Ideas for Better Unsubscribes in Vertical Response and Salesforce
Last Updated on Thursday, 1 May 2008 07:38 Written by Steve Thursday, 1 May 2008 07:38
We’ve been doing more and more Vertical Response setups lately. Especially now that they are giving away 10,000 sends a month to nonprofits. Nice work Vertical Response!
One of the main limitations of the nice Vertical Response Salesforce integration is the way they handle opt outs. If I receive an email sent from Vertical Response via the Salesforce integration and I hit the Unsubscribe link, I will be flagged as having opted out of all emails from the sender.
But many groups that I work with have multiple communication streams that they want people to be able to subscribe to. They want to have someone sign up for Action Alerts, but not the monthly email newsletter. This is really easy to handle on signup, but right now opt outs don’t have that granularity.
Mike posted a comment over at a post I made at nonprofitcrm.org talking about Vertical Response and Salesforce. Mike heard recently from Vertical Response that they’re working on more granular opt outs.
I thought I would suggest some ideas for how to make the system better in relation to Salesforce.com integration. Vertical Response:
- Each list should have an optional “Remove Me from this list” action so that the recipient is presented with two options: globally unsubscribe, and “Stop Receiving Action Alerts”. The link name should be configurable for each list.
- In the list setup, allow the admin to configure the actions that should take place if that “Remove Me” link is followed. Simple field updates on Contact would be great. Set Action_Alerts__c equal to False if someone clicks “Remove Me”, for example.
- If the list comes from a Salesforce Campaign, set the Campaign Member Status to something like “Removed”, or let the Admin set that MemberStatus per list
- If someone hits the Unsubscribe link, continue to set the Contact’s HasOptedOutOfEmail field to True. Sometimes people don’t want to be bothered anymore!
It seems to me that this wouldn’t be that tough to build. The UI for building a list really only needs one more tab, or even just a section on an existing tab. The trick is building the underlying system to trigger when Remove Me is clicked, and then fire off the configured Salesforce related actions.
All good suggestions, which I heartily second.
I would actually suggest making the global opt-out optional for each list as well, and/or allow us to change the wording of the link. Otherwise, I could easily see people being confused about which link does what. We want to make sure they don’t opt out from all email communications from us unless that’s really what they want.
You can change the wording of the unsubscribe link for each send. And I think it’s illegal not to have an unsub link on an email like this, so I doubt it will ever be optional.