In many cases, contacts unsubscribe themselves. But if you need to unsubscribe a contact manually, you can do this from the Contacts master list.
It's possible to unsubscribe a contact on an individual channel level, or a contact level. For example, if you have a contact who has both a subscribed email address and mobile number, you can choose to unsubscribe a single channel identifier—mobile number or email address—or you can unsubscribe the contact entirely, so they no longer receive any marketing communications from you on either channel.
To view all of your suppressed contacts, go to Audience > Suppressions.
You can filter the suppressed contacts list by channel and by suppression reason, for example, to see only unsubscribed email addresses.
Learn more in Understand contact and channel suppressions.
To unsubscribe a contact:
Go to Audience > Contacts.
Select the checkbox for the contact that you want to unsubscribe.
Expand the MORE ACTIONS drop-down menu and select Unsubscribe from account.
Select the checkbox for the channel or channels you want to unsubscribe.
Select UNSUBSCRIBE.
Read the confirmation message, then select OKAY.
Troubleshoot failed unsubscribes
You might be unsubscribing a contact because they have told you they tried to unsubscribe themselves without success. There are a few reasons why your contacts may be experiencing difficulties unsubscribing.
Email addresses
It could be because the email address you are sending campaigns to is an old address which has been redirected to a new email address the contact now uses.
For example, the contact used to use the email address firstname.lastname@example-1.com. Their company rebranded and their email address is now firstname.lastname@example-2.com. The contact’s IT Dept. have set up a redirect so any emails sent to the first address are automatically forwarded to the second. So, even if firstname.lastname@example-2.com is unsubscribed, emails sent to firstname.lastname@example-1.com will still reach them, so this address also needs to be unsubscribed.
The other reason this can happen is when email campaigns are sent to an alias. This means a single email address which acts as a distribution list for multiple other email addresses, such as:
To no longer receive communications, the contact would either have to unsubscribe the alias address (affecting everyone who is part of the distribution list), or request with their IT team to be removed from the alias group (meaning they might miss out on other communications they do want to receive). For this reason, we do not recommend you include alias addresses in your email sends.
Mobile numbers
Some service providers or mobile devices see short codes as premium rate numbers. If a contact tries to send an opt-out SMS message and they have a network block for premium numbers, the opt-out won’t work.
This appears as not sent for the contact who's trying to opt-out. For Android users, they might see a message that says This may cause charges to your mobile account when sending SMS messages to five digit numbers.
It's also important that your contacts are using the correct method to opt-out of SMS communications. Learn more in Unsubscribe and resubscribe to SMS campaigns.