What are the best practices for permission-based email marketing?

Anonymous Blackbaud User

In order to maintain credibility and the trust of your registered users, it is important to follow good permission-based marketing standards when sending email, and that means always allowing recipients the opportunity to opt-out of communications from your organization. Convio supports this best practice by enforcing a required unsubscribe link on every email you send.

Convio will only automatically add an unsubscribe link to your email if you have not already done so yourself. Use the following steps in the Convio WYSIWYG to add an unsubscribe link to either your email stationery footer or within the email body itself:

Type the text you would like to use as the unsubscribe link. Ex: "Unsubscribe from email, or change your email preferences"

Using your mouse or keyboard controls, highlight the text

Select Email from the WYSIWYG Links drop-down

Select Unsubscribe and click Insert

Be sure to test these links as part of your review cycle!

These unsubscribe links are very flexible and can work in several ways:

If you are sending an email from a Campaign which is linked to an Interest, the unsubscribe link will give your constituent a choice between opting out of just that Interest, or out of email entirely.

If you are sending an email from Quick Email, or from an Email Campaign that is not linked to any Interest, your constituent will be presented with a list of all available Interests for which to opt-in or opt-out, OR they can opt out of all email.

You can control some of the language your constituents see around the unsubscribe links using the Site Data Parameters for User Email. Click Site Setup, select Property Type User E-Email and look for the items starting with User_Unsubscribe or User_Unsub.

Every unsubscribe link also includes a request for the constituent to update the email format preference to either HTML or Plain Text. A constituent may skip this step and state no preference.

It's possible that your constituents will contact their own Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to report your email as spam. This will usually not happen if you've done a good job making your unsubscribe links clear, but we do keep track of these complaints on your behalf. Convio recently implemented a new policy of automatically unsubscribing any constituent who reports one of your email messages as spam, as soon as we learn of their complaint. We will not engage them in an email dialog. This policy will help to keep your email lists clean and ensure your spam complaint ratios remain low, which in turn helps to avoid email being blocked.