Hi Everyone,
Over the past few months we’ve made a number of behind the scenes changes to improve the rate at which we process and send emails. We’re continuing our focus on making our email delivery reliable and fast, so we wanted to keep you up to date with a few upcoming changes we’ll be rolling out to the messaging system. This next set of updates will improve how your members customize their preferences and how you as administrators can assist them.
What’s changing?
We’ve received a lot of feedback over the years on how contact center unsubscribes were being handled. In short, it was a pretty unforgiving process that allowed people to unsubscribe without really understanding what they were doing. We’ve redesigned the unsubscribe experience so your members can tailor what emails they receive: contact center emails, forum subscriptions and social community updates. A member will see subscription preferences depending on the features you have enabled and that user’s specific permissions. More details can be found here.
What if someone wants to re-subscribe?
This is the second area where we received a good amount of feedback. Previously, administrators had to help instruct a member on how to log into their profile, navigate to the contact preferences page and adjust the settings. That was a pretty cumbersome process for everyone. After this update members will be prompted with how to resubscribe as soon as they unsubscribe. If a member contacts an administrator with the request to resubscribe, you will be able to send them a link to confirm the request directly from the profile. More details can be found here.
What about deliverability rates?
As part of this project we’ve been working with major ISPs (Comcast, AOL, Yahoo, Google, etc.) to make sure our practices line up with their expectations and that we’ve got a solid reputation with each of them. Without getting too technical, these guys control the flow of email so it’s important to play by their rules.
What about Elists?
We made a similar set of updates to elists last year when the major email providers updated their implementation of DMARC, so there are not any changes to elists as part of this rollout. Elist participants will continue to receive a link to unsubscribe in the footer of their messages.
What about my saved messages?
This update won’t impact any saved messages. You’ll have access to your existing saved messages and future sends will get the new unsubscribe/resubscribe workflows.
Does this impact the Classic version of MemberClicks?
Yes, this update will be rolled out to organizations using MemberClicks Classic as well as those who use the new MemberClicks.
When is this happening?
This rollout will start on on September 21, 2015. We anticipate completing the rollout process by October 9, 2015. If you’d like to get started sooner, just let us know and we’ll get you going.
As always, if you have any questions please let us know by emailing help@memberclicks.com.
Comments
2 comments
Let me first say I am appreciative that MemberClicks is addressing this aspect of the platform's operations. I've been an outspoken critic of the existing unsubscribe functionality, as we've lost a lot of members due to what I believe to be unintentional unsubscribes.
I have a question and a comment. My question is whether "newsletters, announcements and updates from this organization" means ALL emails sent from the Contact Center. The unsubscribe email on the Help page linked above shows each of these items as a separate bullet point, as if they are somehow separate -- but the page the user sees to unsubscribe presents these all as on thing. So I want to confirm that there is, in fact, no way for a user to specify not to receive newsletters but still to receive announcements -- it's all or nothing, right? If so, that's my problem. My organization doesn't use the social media wall and circle functions at all -- they never caught on -- so this still appears to be an all-or-nothing unsubscribe for us. Until MemberClicks allows us to classify outgoing emails by category, and users to unsubscribe by category/type of email, this solution falls short of our needs.
Thanks for the comment, Eric. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback through the beta process and we're excited to be rolling this change out to help minimize any unintentional unsubscribes. For your question, you're correct, we haven't yet added categories for contact center messages. We're planning on looking at this and a few other frequently requested improvements to the contact center once this is rolled out.
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