A "Confirmation of Consent" campaign is a great way to make sure your contacts still want to receive mail from you. It's also an important way to keep your contact lists up to date. Keeping a contact list up to date is important and will improve your sender reputation because the vast majority of your subscribers will be engaging (opening and clicking) your mail.
Step 1 - Verify Your List
Elastic Email is not a list cleaning tool.
But, there are many services out there that are. If you are sending to a very old list, it is best that you first have your list cleaned by a professional contact verification service. Using a contact verification service can help remove invalid addresses and spam trap addresses from your list before sending. This is an effective pro-active first step to curating an engaging contact list, but it is not the last.
Step 2 - Create Your Template
There are a few things that you will want to include in the email. And you are welcome to be creative with the layout and design. You can use the "Confirmation of Consent" template that is available in our Template Gallery as a starting place which can be used and modified. We also have several GDPR specific templates you can choose from by searching GDPR in the Template Gallery.
The body of your mail should remind them why they're getting mail from you in the first place.
You should let them know where they signed up for your mail and when, if you know. Your contact can be refreshed as to why they wanted your mail in the first place, this may be enough to engage them once again.
Include a very large unsubscribe button.
This is critical when you design this email message. You need to ask your contacts if they still want mail from you and if they do then they need to unsubscribe. If they don't want your mail anymore then they must have a very clear, obvious and easy way to unsubscribe. You can easily customize and manage subscription settings from your account. The Unsubscribe Settings Guide shows you how.
Ask them to confirm their subscription.
Adding a "consent" button to your mail is easy. You can track and redirect consent clicks by using the {consent} merge field. Here is a raw HTML example:
<a href="{consent:http://redirect-to-your-own-thank-you-page}">Confirm</a>What this really does is give you a recent record of consent and confidence that any contact that clicks that link, would love to receive your email.
Step 3 - Sending The Campaign
Once you have the template setup you are ready to roll. Who you send your contacts to depends on recently they have heard from you. If you have a group of contacts already in Engaged status who hear from you directly, then maybe you only need to focus on the Active contacts. But if you have uploaded an older list that has not been used for a while, then you probably want to send this campaign to all of your contacts.
Anyone who does not wish to remain subscribed should unsubscribe, and anyone who does will click your "Consent" button. The Contact's ConsentDate and ConsentIP will be automatically updated when someone clicks your "Consent" button using the consent merge tags. All contacts require consent to send mail to them with Elastic Email but now you have an updated record of their consent. You can create a "Recently Consented" segment to help you identify these contacts. For example you could use Now - Consent Date (days) <= 1 to find the contacts that have consented in the last day.
Anyone who has opened your email, but has clicked neither is considered 'Engaged' but maybe at risk of unsubscribing later one. Probably a good idea to send them interesting content to keep them Engaged!
Contacts that are still in Active status after the campaign are contacts that received the email, but did not open or click. There are lots of reasons for this. This guide will help you reach these contacts and get them into Engaged status.