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Unusual unsubscribe count

  • April 17, 2024
  • 5 replies
  • 539 views
C

A campaign was sent out recently and we received an unusually high amount of unsubscribes from the lists. Usually it’s 1-5 but this round there were over 100 contacts that unsubscribed.
I wonder if this is a bug? We’ll have to add those contacts again to the lists but is there a way to prevent this from happening again?

On top of that, I noticed all of those contacts who unsubscribed clicked through almost every link in the campaign?

5 replies

L
  • leadflowagency
  • ActiveCampaign Superuser
  • April 18, 2024

Hi @CassMitchell-

I’ve got a kitchen sink of suggestions.

One new trick that hasn’t been rolled out to everyone yet is the two click unsubscribe. For real humans that click the unsubscribe link in your email (usually footer) they have to confirm they are unsubscribing. It is great. I’m recommend doing this even if as I type this, I realize this probably isn’t your issue. No harm in doing this. You have to request support to add this to your activehosted account.

ActiveCampaign Help Center

I’m also assuming all your domain authentication is complete and you haven’t recently changed anything such as the domain you send from, address, etc. Same for the spam check on the email - assuming it passed.

The main thing in your post that sets off alarm bells is that all the links were clicked. You’ll probably also notice that the opens/clicks were virtually all within a few minutes of the email send time. So these are likely bots.

A betting man would say that these contacts are more likely to be B2B and/or outlook/office365 type emails. You can look at them and see if this holds true.

When I’ve had problems like this, I’ve tried sending an email to the same group via 1:1 emails (assumes you are on an account that has sales / professional and compare results. I’ve also used splits in automations to spread the email send in smaller chunks over 2 hours vs. all at once.

Another thing to try is to change the default unsubscribe link in the email, so that if a system is clicking it, it unsubscribes them from 1 specific list but not all lists.

Honestly it is maddening and seems to come and go. One client had this problem for 1 email in February, and then we took several of these extra measures, and it hasn’t repeated. Another client seems to continually have this issue.

    K
    • keith-rn
    • May 2, 2024

    This just happened to me and I haven’t gotten a response back from ActiveCampaign after 16 hours. 3300 emails unsubscribed (all around the same time so it seems very fishy) and we usually only have 5 or so per campaign. I am trying to recover these emails and AC said they can enable two-factor unsubscribe, but hasn’t offered a solution to resubscribe these emails. This is really unnerving and I don’t know what to do other than to manually resubscribe all of them. Any suggestions?

    C

    Hey Keith, unfortunately ActiveCampaign could not provide any immediate solutions. We had to resubscribe them manually as well.

      K
      • keith-rn
      • May 3, 2024

      Thank you for your feedback. That’s what I’m in the process of doing now. We also have two-factor unsubscribe set up now, so I hope this doesn’t happen again!

      S

      This has just happened to me too.

      I must say I am surprised and disappointed that, if this is a know risk, why

      1. ActiveCampaign doesn’t seem to have done anything to bring it to users attention.
      2. They’ve made it so hard to do anything about it - logging a support ticket rather than clicking an option.
      3. Or probably most importantly - not made this the default behaviour?!
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