Consent & Preferences

Topics and Preferences

Every campaign carries a topic. Recipients opt out of topics rather than of everything, and the platform checks their preference before each individual send.

Where to find it

Architect Panel → Commercial:

• Campaign Manager — where a campaign’s topic is set

Architect Panel → Activity:

• E-mail Log — what was sent
• SMS Log — text sends

Why topics rather than one switch

An all-or-nothing opt-out forces a choice between everything and nothing, and people choose nothing. Somebody who wants their order confirmations but not the newsletter has one option, and you lose the ability to reach them at all.

Topics let them keep what they want. That is better for them and better for you.

Choose a small set of topics

Meaningful to the recipient, not to your internal structure. "Product updates", "Events", "Service notices" are topics somebody can make a decision about. "Campaign type 4" and "Marketing team B" are not.

Keep it short — a preference centre with fifteen checkboxes gets abandoned or unticked entirely.

Set a topic on every campaign

A campaign without one gives the recipient nothing meaningful to opt out of, and undermines the whole mechanism. Make it part of building a campaign, not an optional extra.

Preferences hold across every channel

This is the important behaviour, and it was a real bug once. A preference recorded through the preference centre is written to both the e-mail and the messaging preference stores.

Before that dual-write existed, somebody who opted out of a topic by e-mail was correctly refused by e-mail — and kept receiving the same topic by SMS, because the messaging side read a different store and never saw the opt-out.

As the code comment on the fix puts it: an opt-out that holds in one subsystem and not the other is worse than no preference centre, because the person has evidence they asked. That is exactly right, and it is why the two are kept in step.

Recording a preference is idempotent

Preferences are keyed on the tenant, channel, address and topic, so recording the same answer twice changes nothing and changing it back works through the same path. Somebody can opt out and opt back in without producing conflicting records.

Unsubscribe links are signed

The link in a message carries a signature, so it cannot be altered to unsubscribe somebody else. Recipients do not need to sign in to use it — which matters, because an unsubscribe requiring a login is one people will not complete, and they will report the message as spam instead.

Make unsubscribing easy

It is a legal requirement in most jurisdictions and, more practically, the alternative is worse. Somebody who cannot find the unsubscribe link marks the message as spam, and complaints damage deliverability for everybody on your list.

A prominent, working unsubscribe link protects your ability to reach everybody else.

Honour preferences everywhere

If somebody opts out of a topic, that must hold for any route that sends that topic — including anything you build yourself. The platform handles this for campaigns; custom code should check the same preference rather than sending directly.

Worked example

An organisation runs four topics. A customer opts out of "Events" through the preference centre and keeps the other three. A later events campaign — sent by SMS rather than e-mail — excludes them, because the preference was recorded against both channels when they set it.

Recommendations

• Set a topic on every campaign.
• Keep topics few and meaningful to the recipient.
• Make the unsubscribe link prominent.
• Check preferences in any custom sending code.

Suppression

Suppression is the absolute do-not-send list. It is checked before every individual message, whatever the campaign or the topic.

Where to find it

Architect Panel → Commercial:

• Campaign Manager — campaigns the list is applied to

Architect Panel → Activity:

• E-mail Log — sends and their results

Suppression is not a preference

The distinction matters:

• A preference is topic-level and set by the recipient. They still hear from you about other topics.
• Suppression is address-level and absolute. Nothing goes to that address.

Preferences are a choice; suppression is a hard stop, usually created by something going wrong.

How addresses get on the list

• A hard bounce — the address does not exist.
• A complaint — the recipient marked a message as spam.
• A manual addition — somebody asked in writing, or by another route.

Why it protects you

Continuing to send to addresses that bounce, or to people who have complained, is precisely what receiving mail systems use to judge whether you are a legitimate sender.

Suppression is therefore not merely courteous — it is what keeps your messages reaching everybody else. A list allowed to accumulate dead addresses will eventually see all your mail treated as spam, including transactional messages people need.

Suppression applies across channels too

Like preferences, suppression is dual-written, so an address suppressed on one side is suppressed on the other. Somebody who complained about an e-mail does not then receive the same thing by text.

Do not remove entries

The temptation arrives when a valuable customer's address is suppressed and somebody wants to reach them. Resist it.

If they complained, sending again is the worst possible response. If it was a hard bounce, the address does not work and sending achieves nothing while damaging your reputation.

Contact them another way, and get a fresh, correct address from them directly.

The legitimate exception

A confirmed error — the wrong address suppressed through a mistaken bulk action, or somebody who has explicitly asked to be re-subscribed and given you a working address. Both are rare and both should be recorded.

Review the list for what it tells you

A rising suppression rate is a data quality signal. Many hard bounces means your addresses are decaying; many complaints means your content, frequency or audience selection is wrong — and complaints are the more urgent of the two.

Complaints deserve investigation

People who complain generally could have unsubscribed instead. When several do, something about that campaign made unsubscribing feel harder than complaining — an unclear link, an unexpected message, an audience who did not remember opting in.

Worked example

After a campaign, an organisation sees eleven complaints against a usual figure of one or two. The audience turned out to include people who had not heard from them in three years and did not recognise the sender. The list is cleaned to active contacts and a re-permission campaign is sent to the rest — complaints return to normal on the next send.

Recommendations

• Never remove a suppression to reach somebody.
• Treat a complaint spike as urgent.
• Watch bounce rates as a data quality measure.
• Get a fresh address from the person, not from your records.

Bounces and Complaints

Sending a message is not the end of it. Providers report back what happened, and that feedback is ingested automatically.

Where to find it

Architect Panel → Commercial:

• Campaign Manager — campaign results

Architect Panel → Activity:

• E-mail Log — the individual message and its result

Architect Panel → Integration & Connections:

• E-mail Accounts — the sending account feedback arrives for

Hard and soft bounces

• A hard bounce is permanent — the address does not exist, or the domain does not. It will never succeed, and the address is suppressed.
• A soft bounce is temporary — a full mailbox, a server unavailable, a message too large. It may well succeed later.

Treating them the same is the mistake in both directions: suppressing on a soft bounce loses contacts unnecessarily, and retrying a hard bounce damages your reputation.

Complaints

A complaint means the recipient marked your message as spam. It is the most serious signal there is — mail providers weight it heavily, and a complaint rate above a fraction of a percent will start affecting delivery for your whole list.

Complaints result in suppression, immediately and correctly.

Watch the rates, not the counts

A hundred bounces from a list of fifty thousand is unremarkable. A hundred from a list of five hundred is a serious problem. Track both as proportions and watch the trend across campaigns.

What a rising bounce rate means

Usually that your data is ageing — people change jobs and addresses stop working. It can also mean a segment is picking up records it should not, such as old imports or test data.

Either way it is a prompt to clean the list rather than to keep sending.

What a rising complaint rate means

Something about the messages, in roughly this order of likelihood:

• People do not remember opting in, usually because it was too long ago.
• You are sending too often.
• The content is not what they expected when they signed up.
• The unsubscribe link is hard to find, so complaining is easier.

Feedback arrives asynchronously

Bounces and complaints come back over minutes to hours after sending, so a campaign that looks clean an hour after finishing may not be. Review results a day later rather than immediately.

Clean before a big campaign

Sending to a stale list is how reputations are damaged. Before a large or important campaign, exclude addresses that have not engaged in a long time — the messages were unlikely to be read, and the bounces and complaints they generate affect everything else you send.

Do not send to purchased lists

Worth stating plainly. They generate complaints and bounces at rates that will damage your sending reputation for months, and in most jurisdictions the sending is unlawful. No campaign result is worth it.

Worked example

A monthly newsletter runs at about 0.3% bounces and near-zero complaints. One month bounces jump to 4%, which traces to a segment change that had pulled in a three-year-old imported list. The segment is corrected, the dead addresses are left suppressed, and the following month returns to normal.

Recommendations

• Distinguish hard from soft bounces.
• Track rates as proportions, and watch the trend.
• Review results a day after sending, not immediately.
• Clean the list before a large campaign.