Subscribe and Unsubscribe Campaigns

Subscribe and unsubscribe campaigns enable you to send response communications directly to each customer who subscribes to or unsubscribes from your conversations. Subscribe and unsubscribe campaigns differ from other campaigns primarily in that they are automatically generated by the system for each customer who opts in or out of a conversation. In effect, when you create subscription and unsubscription campaigns for a conversation, what you are actually doing is defining the rules for the individual subscribe and unsubscribe campaigns that the system will later generate for each person who opts to join or leave that conversation.

Designing Subscribe and Unsubscribe Campaigns

In this section we'll explain briefly how subscribe and unsubscribe campaigns work and provide some guidelines for their creation and design. To begin with, it's important to understand that subscribe and unsubscribe campaigns are a type of externally triggered campaign - they're generated by the system each time the Connect system receives an indication that a customer is opting in or out of a specific conversation. Secondly, keep in mind that these campaigns work on an individual basis - they are generated based on a set of rules that you define and exist to communicate with individual customers as they join or leave a particular conversation. Finally, it's important to understand that each conversation you define can only have one subscribe and unsubscribe campaign associated with it.

There are a variety of ways that a subscribe or unsubscribe campaign can be triggered for a customer. Two common ways are:

Through the receipt of XML data from a website form, where a customer has signed up for (or asked to be removed from) a specific conversation.
By replying to an e-mail in which the customer is invited to join or remove themselves from a specific conversation. For example, a customer already participating in one of your conversations could receive a message inviting them to join another conversation.

With the most basic subscribe and unsubscribe campaigns, the primary intent is to send a confirmation message to an individual customer, confirming their decision to join or leave a conversation and its associated campaigns. Once the confirmation message is sent the customer is opted in or out of the associated conversation (and any campaigns utilizing that conversation).

You can also choose to utilize a special "double permissions" reply handler for subscribe campaigns. This reply handler enables the customer to confirm that they really do want to join a conversation. For example, say your system receives information indicating that a customer wishes to join a conversation involving sporting equipment. If you have Double Permissions turned on, the system will generate a subscribe campaign that initially sends the customer a message requesting that they reply to indicate that they do in fact wish to join that conversation. If the system receives a reply from the customer, the customer will be opted into the conversation. On the other hand, if it does not receive a reply, nothing will happen.

Keep in mind that when a customer subscribes to a conversation, they become involved in all of the campaigns that are associated with that conversation. This can have a great effect on how you create and manage your conversations and campaigns. For example, if you have two conversations, one for sending out messages regarding special promotions and another for sending out customer order receipts, a customer can opt to unsubscribe from the promotions campaign, but still receive order receipts. But if you have both of these types of communications associated with one conversation, you could easily have a situation where that customer could inadvertently cut themselves out of the conversation that gives them order receipts when they unsubscribe from a special promotion e-mail.