Email Preferences Best Practices

There are two types of emails: marketing and transactional. An example of a transactional email is when someone receives a confirmation after they make a payment. These emails are normal and expected, and are therefore not regulated nearly as much as marketing emails.

Marketing emails are often sent to a list of recipients. Numerous laws exist to protect consumers from receiving unwanted marketing emails. As a result, you are required to receive express permission from the recipients to receive these emails. In the past, we did not allow organization administrators to subscribe their participants to emails. However, we have made some changes to allow organization administrators to subscribe their participants to emails as long as the participant has given them express permission.

How to receive permission from participants to receive marketing emails?

The easiest way to receive permission from participants to receive marketing emails is to allow them to set their own email notification preferences. Participants can set their own preferences by logging in and going to the profile page or by going to the public Communication Preferences page. The easiest way to send participants to the Communication Preferences page is by going to the Participants page, opening their profile, and clicking the Send Update Email button.

If these methods are not an option, then you may subscribe people to emails yourself if, and only if, they give you permission to subscribe them.

What are the consequences of sending emails without permission?

When you try to send an email to an email address that doesn't exist, the email server will flag your email and return an undeliverable response. If this happens enough times, the email server will downgrade our server, which makes all email going to the email server less likely to end up in a person's inbox.

Sometimes when people receive emails they didn't ask for, they flag it as spam to their email provider. If this happens enough times, the email will server could blacklist our server, making it more difficult for the emails coming from our server to end up in a person's inbox.

Can I resubscribe someone who unsubscribed?

No, you may not resubscribe someone who unsubscribed from receiving emails. However, the person who unsubscribed themselves can resubscribe themselves at any time by using one of the methods mentioned above.