I have an issue with Transactional Emails with no unsubscribe links being wrongly « unsubscribable ».
For emails in a drip sequence, even if they do not have an unsubscribe link in them they still are « unsubscribable ». In other words, they do get picked up by email inbox cleaning tools with a CTA to « unsubscribe » as sadly, the header on these emails now informs these tools that these are mailing-list type of emails.
So, in my drip sequence, the first email does not have an unsubscribe link, it is a response to a signup action and provides information on how to use an application (I even use a separate email address for this). Then, the next emails in the drip sequence are marketing and in those I add an unsubscribe link (and send them with a second email address).
Because the first email without unsubscribe links has its header wrongly defined, I get users unsubscribing to the first email. Then, since unsubscribe is per email address, they end up receiving the drip sequence (since it is sent by another email address) and I’d rather they didn’t receive any further emails, since they have actually tried to unsubscribe from my marketing emails with their « unsubscribe » action.
I see no issue with having « unsubscribe » being by sender, that is correct. The issue here is with the header of emails with no unsubscribe links, those emails should not be « unsubscribable ».
What happens is that, for compliance purposes, Brevo automatically adds a list-unsubscribe header. There is a possibility to remove it and replace it by a list-help header; this is available to Enterprise plans
@ahudavert Thanks for the clarification. Why is this feature only available to Enterprise customers? It basically renders Brevo transactional mailings unusable in most projects.
Scenarios:
Website sends a newsletter with their own system through Brevo SMTP, containing an unsubscribe link. But on e.g. Gmail there is a prominent unsubscribe link that allows unsubscribing through Brevo directly.
Even worse: If this person later fills out a contact form on the same website - that has absolutely nothing to do with the newsletter - the confirmation won’t arrive because they unsubscribed from the newsletter earlier.
Also bad: Website sends a newsletter to internal users only that must be « un-unsubscribable » because it contains information (e.g. to students) that is mandatory to be read. Recipients can unsubscribe nevertheless.
Is the only scenario here moving away from Brevo (again)?
Our non-profit association used to send a newsletter (with Sendinblue before the merge) with unsubscribe option, of course. However, it was convenient to have a mail layout in place to send general meeting invitations to the « members » segment. Providing an email for that purpose is mandatory and an unsubscribe link would be contradictory. Sendinblue provided a warning but allowed to skip the unsubscribe link.
Similar for website user accounts: when technically required, we used to inform users about changes, like « please set a new password ».
As a newsletter tool, Brevo has awesome features and a strength re. GDPR. Lacking options for secondary use, makes us reconsider, désolé.