Instant Unsubscribe

[John_Danielson1]

We are in the process of setting up our preference center and would like to have options to manage preferences as well as the option to instantly unsubscribe. I was under the impression that a person would be unsubscribed by just clicking the link in our footer. It appears that is not the case and you are brought to our unsubscribe page where your email address is pre-populated and you click an unsubscribe button. Is there any way to make it so clicking the link instantly unsubscribes and you're not forced to click another button on the landing page?

The solution I read in another discussion was to create a landing page and set up a campaign that says anytime someone lands on that page, change data value for unsubscribe to true.

Also, can someone explain what these variables do and why they are critical?

• %mkt_opt_out_prefix%
• mkt_unsubscribe=1&mkt_tok=##MKT_TOK##

Thanks!

JD

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

• %mkt_opt_out_prefix% - this is your base URL for marketo pages
• mkt_unsubscribe=1&mkt_tok=##MKT_TOK## - this tells Marketo to trigger the Unsubscribes from Email action and in email reports.

NEITHER is required to set someone's unsubscribe. You can have a hidden field of Unsubscribe=TRUE and just display the email unsub field, which is what the default Unsub form does.

What I recommend is:

• Link 1: Manage Your Preferences > goes to new page with options
• Link 2: "unsubscribe" which goes directly to the original form and page you have.

[John_Danielson1]

Josh, thanks for the quick response! I think we have figured out what we need to do. I'll be sure to come back here and leave a comment if we hit any roadblocks.

[Anonymous]

John,

Were you able to figure out the instant unsubscribe from email? We want it to instantly unsubscribe the person if they click the link in the email, and take them to a confirmation page where there is an optional survey to fill out on why they unsubscribed. We don't want the person to have to submit the survey to confirm the unsubscribe. Sounds like you were trying to do a similar thing?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Kate, I'd pay close attention to my warning above about mail scanners prechecking your URLs. Any "instant" action is thus vulnerable to false positives. For something as important as an unsubscribe, I doubt this is worth the risk.

[SanfordWhiteman]

We are in the process of setting up our preference center and would like to have options to manage preferences as well as the option to instantly unsubscribe. I was under the impression that a person would be unsubscribed by just clicking the link in our footer. It appears that is not the case and you are brought to our unsubscribe page where your email address is pre-populated and you click an unsubscribe button. Is there any way to make it so clicking the link instantly unsubscribes and you're not forced to click another button on the landing page?

John, just to close the circle here, a true instant unsubscribe (with no prompt) runs a higher risk of [1] a person to whom an email was merely forwarded unsubscribing the original lead, since there's no chance for them to pause; or [2] an anti-spam/malware scanner following the link and unsubscribing the lead.