Service emails are used to communicate important information that helps your customers use, manage, or maintain their service. These emails are not promotional and may be exempt from marketing consent requirements. This means they do not require an unsubscribe link, but you must ensure they meet legal and deliverability standards.
Before you start
Things you need to know:
Get legal advice - we recommend seeking independent legal advice before sending service emails to ensure you're complying with privacy laws.
Make unsubscribing easy - if contacts can't easily unsubscribe, they may stop engaging with your emails, which harms your sender reputation over time. Some may mark your emails as spam, which can cause immediate damage. A poor sender reputation increases the chances of your emails landing in the spam folder.
Follow mailbox provider rules - from February 2024, Gmail, Yahoo, and other providers require promotional emails to include a clear way to unsubscribe. If you don’t include this, your emails may be flagged with warning banners, sent to spam, or rejected.
Requirements for sending service emails
To send service emails from Dotdigital, you must:
Use a dedicated child account with a delegated or self-hosted custom From address.
A service account must be separate from any account used to send marketing emails. The unsubscribe requirement cannot be removed from an account that also sends promotional content, so a dedicated account is essential.
Contact your Customer Success Manager to set up the required account and From address.
Provide detailed justification for the service emails, including examples of the content, to our deliverability team at deliverability@dotdigital.com.
The deliverability team reviews your request to determine if the emails qualify as service communications.
Once approved, the unsubscribe link requirement is removed from your account. You can then remove the unsubscribe link from your campaigns using Easy Editor and save your content.