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Alina Shafikova
Written by Alina Shafikova

How to organise the subscription management process

Effective subscription management is essential to maintain engaged newsletter audiences, reduce churn, and optimize communication strategies.


Effective subscription management is the key to maintaining an engaged and loyal audience. By implementing best practices for managing subscribers, you can reduce churn, enhance the relevance of the content, and optimize the communication strategies to better meet the needs and interests of the users. This article explores strategies and tools to help you master subscription management and boost your newsletter's performance.

What are user lists?

In the context of a marketing automation tool, user lists refer to organized collections of users based on specific criteria such as demographics, behavior, interactions, or purchase history. These lists are used to streamline marketing efforts by targeting specific segments of users with tailored messages, campaigns, or offers. By leveraging user lists, you can enhance engagement, increase efficiency, and drive more personalized interactions with their audience.

You can fins more info about about user list in the following article.

It's important to remember, that user lists are the static ones. You can add users to the lists manually, via import or automations and users will stay there until you decide to remove users from the specific list. The second option is the usage of the unsubscribe tag - then users can remove themselves from the list.
It's the main difference of the lists from the segments (dynamic lists). Check more info about the differences between user lists, tags and segments in the article. There you can also find the recommended examples of the usage.

To allow your users to unsubscribe from the lists, you need to follow the steps described in the article.

Due to the "static" characteristic user lists require setting some rules not only for the list entry but also for the list removal and some actions that will leave the info about it in the system.

How to manage the lists?

First of all you need to define what you want to use user lists for. We highly recommend to use them for different kinds of mailing segmentation. It's a convenient way as you can always add "unsubscribe from specific list" button to your campaigns. It will allow the recipients to unsubscribe from one list, but not from all the emails sent from your side. (instructions)

You can also configure a page with all public lists to give the "subscription management" option to your users. More about it here.

So, let's take the "Newsletter list" as the example. In this case user can become a newsletter subscriber through the embed forms and pop-ups on the website.
Once user goes through the double opt-in process, automation will add this user to the Newsletter list.

So, each time you send a newsletter you simple filter out the recipients by the "Newsletter" list.

If you want to save the datetime of the moment, when user enters a list, remember to create an automation to fire an event.

Example:

Complete double opt-in implementation process is described in the following article.

However, now you also need to define the rules of getting out of the list. If there are any conditions when user should be removed from the list.

In case of the Newsletter list there are 2 main situations:

  • user clicks the "unsubscribe from specific list" button in the email

  • user unsubscribes from all your emails in general

When it comes to "unsubscribe from specific list" use will be removed from the list automatically. However, again, if you want to catch and save the datetime of this action you need to fire the event "Newsletter unsubscribe".

When user unsubscribes from all your emails at once using the general unsubscribe link or one-click unsubscribe, the attribute "unsubscribe from emails" is automatically updated with the "true" value and all future deliveries are blocked in the system. Anyway, it's not connected with the Newsletter list. So, you can create one complete flow to manage both cases and update the attribute "Marketing consent" with the "true" value (if you use one).

First flow does the following thing:

When user's attribute "unsubscribe from emails" gets updated the system checks if it now has the "true" value. If so, then the app removes the user from the Newsletter list and updates the "Marketing consent" with "false" value.

The second part covers the "Newsletter unsubscribe" event that was described above.


The third one works for those users who changed their mind and after resignation decided to subscribe to your campaigns again. When user is added to the "Newsletter list" the app updates the "unsubscribe from emails" emails with the "false" value.

Recommended timing for such automation: each time condition is met.

Definitely, you can multiply/modify the process for other lists that you have in the data structure.

These processes will allow you to keep control over the lists in the application, keep the data up-to-date and send personalised content only to active subscribers.

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