4. MailOut – Unsubscribe

Sending Email is easy. Having it delivered to the receipients Inbox is actually quite hard!

We’ve already written about doing your utmost with your existing Club Email to ensure delivery in Emails – Why are emails to valid email addresses being rejected or sent to spam? but it’s not quite the whole story, especially when you could be sending what might be considered Bulk Email or non-transactional emails. While Crossmember is not at the scale of sending out millions of emails, newsletters and renewals are not considered transactional and should adhere to the latests guidelines.

During the early months of 2024, Google and Yahoo (amongst others) started to make a big play on the use of Unsubscribe. The point being that the receipient should be in control of what goes into their Inbox and they made a big point of “one-click unsubscribe”. One Click Unsubscribe is a special header (not usually visible) in the Email message that informs the mail client that you’re using of the unsubscribe link. You might have seen ‘unsubscribe‘ at the top of some emails in your smart phone email client. It’s this one click method that’s being used here. The Crossmember MailOut system uses this One-Click unsubscribe system.

Additionally, there will be at the bottom of the email the usual unsubscibe links for users to Click on. Why two methods? Because different email clients may not use One Click Unsubscribe and do not show it all of the time – good huh! So much for rules!

The provision of all unsubscribe links goes a fair way to helping ensure email deliverability and not being marked as spam. Also if you don’t have any unsubscribe links, it is likely that people may get fed up of your emails and hit their Spam button in the absence of Unsubscribe. The spam button does get fed back up through the email chain and contributes to reducing your email sending reputation and too many of them could result in being flagged a spammer. We dont want that!

If a Club member clicks on an unsubscribe link, they will see something like this:

In this case, it was a member unsubscribing from a regional organisers communication. This was a one click unsubscribe method as no other action was required from the member.

If we check this members membership record we will see this:

NOTE: If a member unsubscribes from Regional Organiser Communications, they are effectively removed from the region – regardless of their region allocation. The member WILL NOT show up an any regional reports even if run by Club Officials and cannot be seen by the Organiser.

The Member will receive a confirmation email that the unsubscribe has taken place.

The Membership Secretary will have an entry placed in the Activity List to notify them that the member has unsubscribed.