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Autopilot: Add list-specific subscribe or unsubscribe links to your emails

Adding list-specific unsubscribe links to your emails

To comply with best practices, all emails sent via Autopilot include a mandatory unsubscribe link (which you can customize). When a user clicks this link they are opted-out of receiving any email from Autopilot.

On some occasions you may want to also allow your contacts to opt-out of specific lists. This allows recipients to stop receiving emails on topics that don't interest them, without opting out of all communications from you.

In Autopilot you can achieve this by using the Smart Segment trigger together with UTM URLs. Below are the steps to achieve this.

1. Create a link with a unique UTM unsubscribe parameter for that list

The first thing you need to do is create a UTM URL, which you'll be using in your email. This is very simple to do using a tool that Google provideshere. You can learn more about using UTM in Autopilothere.

The important thing is to have a parameter in the URL specific to that list, for example below I've put "newsletterlistunsubscribe" into the "utm_content" parameter to allow people to unsubscribe from my newsletter list:

www.petersharkey.com/unsubscribesuccessful?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=newsletterlistunsubscribe&utm_campaign=productupdate

Remember to customize the web page you're directing contacts to with a message so that they know their unsubscribe was successful.

2. Add the link to email

Below you will see that I have two unsubscribe links in my email:

  • "Unsubscribe from this list" links to the UTM URL above (note that you could say anything you want here. For example, you might want to specify the list name); and
  • "Unsubscribe from all emails" is the standard global unsubscribe link, which I have customized.

3. Create a smart segment which is refined by your UTM parameter

You can learn how to create a smart segment here. Your smart segment should be refined by your specific UTM parameter:

In my case (based on the above example) I would refine by utm_content and enter newsletterlistunsubscribe.

4. Create a Journey to perform to list removal

Create a Journey that connects the Smart Segment trigger with the Remove from List action.

In the Smart Segment Trigger remember to choose the "Add contacts who enter this segment in the future" option.

Publish this Journey and you're done. Now any contact who clicks on that link will be automatically removed from the list. You can re-use the link in other emails you send to that list.

To add list-specific subscribe links to your emails, simply follow the above process, but instead of using the Remove From List Action in your Journey, use the Add to List action.