Direct Unsubscribe

Direct Unsubscribe allows you to unsubscribe contacts via pages on your website, or from emails you send them via the application.

Direct Unsubscribe uses an img tag added to a page on your site to handle unsubscriptions. When a contact navigates to a page on your site where you have added the Direct Unsubscribe img tag, they will be identified via a cookie. If a cookie is not set in the contact's browser, you will need to add the email address of the contact on to the URL used in the img tag. The Direct Unsubscribe URL is contained in the img tag obtained on the Data Exchange page. When a contact is unsubscribed, they will be given a status of Unsubscribed and will no longer receive marketing emails from your account.

Warning:
If you are using a private domain and want to use Direct Unsubscribe on a page accessed using https, you must do the following:
  • Change the URL in the Direct Unsubscribe img tag src attribute to use https.
  • Change the domain in the Direct Unsubscribe img tag src attribute to app.bronto.com.
If you are programmatically adding the email address, it should be added to the URL as a parameter using the following format: &email=example@example.com. 
http://public_domain/public/?q=direct_unsub&fn=Public_DirectUnsubscribeForm&id=IDSTRING&email=email@example.com
If you choose to programmatically add in the email address of the contact you wish to unsubscribe, the email address you add will take precedence over the cookie.

Some characters that are allowed in a URL are considered reserved characters. A reserved character is a character that can have a special meaning, for example a + symbol. It's a best practice to avoid using reserved characters within an email address (except for @) and you should try to limit your contacts' ability to use them. However, if they do have a reserved character in their email you can encode the character so that it can be used in your URL. For example + would need to be encoded as %2B.

The Direct Unsubscribe URL provided is unique to your account and allows the application to identify your account. The q, fn, and id parameters allow the application to process the data that is to follow, as well as identify your account. The last bit, &email=email@example.com is the actual string that contains the contact's email address.

You can also use the comment parameter to provide more information about your contact source in consent reports. For example, if the last part of your URL is &email=email@example.com&comment=UnsubscribedWeb, the source detail value for this contact in your consent report will be UnsubscribedWeb.

Note: Contacts with a status of Unsubscribed have either unsubscribed themselves from receiving marketing emails from you, or were unsubscribed by you. Contacts can unsubscribe themselves by clicking an unsubscribe link, or by manually marking an email from you as spam in their inbox. When a contact is unsubscribed, their status changes to Unsubscribed. When their status is changed to Unsubscribed, the contact will no longer receive marketing emails from you. The contact can still receive transactional emails from you. The contact will also remain on any lists they have been added to.