How does transactional e-mail unsubscribe work?

English
1

Hi,

I am a developer researching API integration costs, not a Brevo user.

We plan to have both standard newsletters and drip campaigns managed by our system and send the e-mails through the transactional API. Drip e-mails must include an unsubscribe link. My questions:

How does unsubscribe from transactional e-mail actually work?

Will this propagate to the newsletter contact (if there is such)?

Will further transactional e-mails to this address fail?

I know there is a webhook, but there seems to be also some status filtering in Brevo’s UI (Unsubscribed from emails), so I guess the status is internally known even for transactional e-mails (?)

2

Hi @lukasnevosad , thanks for posting on this community.

By « drip campaigns » you mean what we call transactional emails in this article, right? https://help.brevo.com/hc/en-us/articles/9741388688402-Do-I-need-to-add-an-unsubscribe-link-to-my-emails#tab-content-21

If not, it is not mandatory to include an unsubscription link in these types of campaigns.

About the unsubscription status: Brevo manages a subscription status per campaign type, meaning people can be subscribed to marketing campaigns but not to transactional emails, and vice versa.
Once unsubscribed from a communication type (marketing / transactional), emails won’t be sent any more to this contact, for this type of communication only.

You can check your contact status by following these steps: https://help.brevo.com/hc/en-us/articles/5317448358034-Blocklist-unblock-or-re-subscribe-contacts#h_01HRS2014RGGFTKB3WHP77E1CH

I hope this helps!

3

Thank you for clarifying this. Yes, I mean what is described as « Email campaigns » in that article. I understand the two separate buckets for unsubscribe. One follow up:

If the user unsubscribes from transactional e-mails, further transactional e-mails of any kind will fail. This means they would not also receive legit transactional e-mails, such as reset password etc. Is there a way around this?

Thanks,

Lukas

4

Hi @lukasnevosad ,

absolutely, they would not receive any other transactional emails.
I think there are no other specific ways besides being sure that transactional emails are transactional emails, so that you reduce as much as possible the probability that your contacts will unsubscribe from them.

5

I am having the same issue. This is my flow and it doesn’t make sense to me:

  1. User signs up and gives consent (or not) to marketing emails.
  2. New users enter an onboarding flow, which some may interpret to be marketing (or, at the very least, emails they don’t want). So they click ‹ Unsubscribe ›.
  3. This unsubscribes them from transactional emails but not marketing emails.
  4. The next time I send a marketing campaign, this user still receives it and gets annoyed that their unsubscribe request has seemingly been ignored.
  5. The user forgets their password and requests a reset that never arrives. They are now angry that the password reset function « doesn’t work ».

Now, I realise that I could set up an automation that would unsubscribe people from marketing emails when they unsubscribe from transactional emails, but that doesn’t solve the problem of them not receiving essential transactional emails.

The problem all stems from automations like an onboarding drip feed being described as transactional, when it is much closer to being marketing.

Should I just remove the unsubscribe link from my onboarding emails (since we are saying they are transactional anyway)? But that might just get my emails reported as spam.