Learn to unsubscribe a contact, so they no longer receive communications from either an address book or your entire account.
Overview
In most cases, contacts unsubscribe themselves. But if you need to unsubscribe a contact yourself, you can do it in one of two ways:
Unsubscribe a contact from an address book
When you unsubscribe a contact from an address book, they are unsubscribed from that address book only. The contact continues to be a part of the All contacts address book, and any other address books they subscribed to.
To unsubscribe a contact from an address book:
- Go to Contacts.
- Select an address book name.
- Select the checkbox for the contacts that you want to unsubscribe from the address book.
- Expand the More actions drop-down menu and select Unsubscribe from address book.
Unsubscribe contacts from your account
When you unsubscribe a contact from your account, we remove the contact from all your address books and suppress them as a contact. This eliminates any chance of you accidentally communicating with them in the future.
To view all your suppressed contacts, go to Contacts > Suppressed contacts.
To unsubscribe a contact from your account:
- Go to Contacts > All contacts.
- Select the All contacts address book.
- Select the contact that you want to unsubscribe from your account.
- Expand the More actions drop-down menu and select Unsubscribe from account.
Troubleshoot failed unsubscribes
You might be unsubscribing a contact because they have told you they tried to unsubscribe themselves without success. There are a couple of reasons why your contacts may be experiencing difficulties unsubscribing.
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.
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.
- contactus@example.com
- support@example.co.uk
- accounts@example.ac.uk
- info@example.org
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.