I have four lists that subscribers can opt in to and a number of users will subscribe to multiple newsletters but want to update their subscriptions at some point. For example, a subscriber may sign up for our daily news report and our weekly summary, and later decide they only need the weekly summary.
I see that you can go to lists, select the drop down menu, select advanced setting, then public page, and you have the option to edit subscriber updates. However, I only have the option to create a new field. It won’t let me pull in my lists so that subscribers can see what they are subscribed to and check/uncheck what they would like to receive.
Any ideas? If I create a form field that lists my subscriptions, I can’t figure out how to easily tie it to my lists, it won’t show what they are already subscribed to in case they want to opt out of one subscription (ie. list) but keep the other.
Thats a great question! There are a couple ways do handle this. The first way, if you absolutely must have four different lists, then you should create a custom form field for each list as a checkbox. You can pass parameters to our hosted forms via special query string parameters.
Using automations, when a contact updates those custom fields (via the form) you would need to unsubscribe them from the list. The inverse is also true, if the contact unsubscribes from a list, make sure to update the custom fields on the contact record.
More this functionality is outlined in this discussion on Two Step Forms.
The easier way is to create just one list, and the same 4 custom fields. Then when you want to send an email, instead of sending the email to a separate list send the email to a separate segment using the segment builder.
That way you don’t have to worry about keeping all the lists and the custom fields in sync.
Thanks for the info. I’d love to keep it simple. But my concern with having one single list with tags, versus a list for each subscription, that when people select unsubscribe from one of our newsletters, they would be unsubscribed from all newsletters, correct?
I can’t think of any threads off the top of my head, but that could be a great topic of conversation for a ActiveCampaign training. Personally I like as few lists as possible, because it is easier to filter people out in an automation, than to add them in, and I send way more automated emails than campaigns.
Moving everyone to one list would be relatively easy.
Simply select everyone from a specific list, and bulk edit them to add a tag. Here is a quick video demonstrating the process. You would repeat this process to add the contact to the absorbing (large) list, and remove them from the smaller list. You could also keep the old list around if you wanted to. We charge per contact so other than keeping things organized there is no need not to.
Here is how you would segment them in a campaign blast
Thanks for the info. I’d love to keep it simple. But my concern with having one single list with tags, versus a list for each subscription, is that when people select unsubscribe from one of our newsletters, they would be unsubscribed from all newsletters, correct?
The easy way to mitigate that would be to include a [more visible] link to “manage your preferences” to the form we are describing in this thread, or to include child “unsubscribe” links that when clicked, trigger an automation to remove the tag.
Yes, I saw that which is what made me concerned about having a single list.
Since it seem easier to create an Update Subscription form with tags, would it make sense to have AM automatically create a corresponding tag for every subscription (list) people sign up for? Then I could easily customize the Update Subscriptions form from the tags, with a command to also update the lists if they are changed? Hope that makes sense.
Don’t know if that is possible, just brainstorming.
Glossing over the design and formatting, which you can handle however you want to, you simply include links in the email template that point to some general “Thanks, your preferences have been recorded” webpage.
Each link will need to be unique, so you can differentiate each one by including a query parameter like ?remove-tag=blue-tag. This query parameter doesn’t actually do anything, it just makes it so you can have several links each with their own action all pointing to the same page.
Then from the email template you just add an action when a contact clicks on the link to remove the tag.
You can also handle this from inside an automation, if you wanted to do more than this, or move the control outside of the campaign.
Start the automation with a trigger: “When link is clicked” and select the ?remove-tag=blue-tag links from all of your automations.
Then perform whatever actions you would like to have happen (remove tag SUBLIST: Blue for example).
I think you might be misunderstanding. You can put whatever you want as the query parameter, its only purpose is something that you can use to differentiate each link. The url could be example.com?remove-tag=nonsense
The important thing is that each link needs to be unique so that you can perform a different action on each one.
It is the second step where you would remove the tags from the contact.
