(MC-4) Managing Contact Mailing Subscriptions

Workshop Angel includes a full mailing list management function so you can manage both your existing clients as well as your prospective ones!

Let's dive into the details of how it works...

Mailing Subscriptions - The Concept

Over a long period of time, a contact may decide to signup for a mailing list, to later unsubscribe, and then re-signup some time after that.

It is also possible that you have defined multiple brands within Workshop Angel, and that a contact may be interested in one of your brand's activities, but not the other.

To handle these situations, we have implemented the idea of a Mailing Subscription, which has these properties:

  • Start date - the date they signed up to be on your mailing list

  • End date - the date they ended their subscription

  • Subscription source - i.e. how they subscribed.

  • Brand - if you use more than one brand, which brand they have signed up to. (Brands are discussed in lesson AF-4)

Accessing a Contact's Mailing Subscription

To manage a contact's mailing subscription:

This will bring you to the Mailing Subscriptions screen for this contact:

Adding a Mailing Subscription To an Existing Contact

If a contact has given you permission to add them to your mailing list verbally or via an email, you can add their subscription locally in their contact record:

A new subscription appears with today's date and a subscription source of "Other".

To edit the subscription source or date:

You would also be advised to describe in their notes section about the conversation or email to be sure you are complying with laws regarding the management of personal data.

A contact who has an active mailing subscription for at least one of your brands will have the mailing subscription icon shown next to their name in the search results:

So in this example, Percy and Peppino have active subscriptions, and Pedro does not.

Adding Mailing Subscriptions via the Web Form

The place you are most likely to add new mailing list contacts is via a form accessible on your web site and social media pages. Workshop Angel provides a simple form you can access for this.

To link to the mailing list subscription form for your brand:

This will copy a link to the Mailing List Signup Form for your live database.

When you or your contacts visit the link, you will come to a page like this:

When a contact fills in form and click on [Sign Me Up], one of the following things will happen:

  • If they have an existing contact record with the specified email address, their contact record will be updated with a mailing list subscription. Their First name and Last name will also be updated to those specified on the form.

  • If they do not have an existing contact record with the specified email address, then a new contact record will be created and the mailing list subscription will be added.

You can link to this page or embed it in your web site as you required.

Adding Mailing Subscriptions via the Booking Form

When a client books onto one of your activities, then they are expecting to receive emails from you about the activity itself. However, it is generally considered bad practice to automatically subscribe them to your marketing email list unless you have asked them if they specifically want you to do this.

In Workshop Angel, you can ask a question during the booking process about whether they wish to be subscribed to your marketing email list.

To generate the mailing list question:

The response to this question will produce the following actions:

  • If the contact does not have an active Mailing Subscription - a Mailing Subscription is created if the response is Yes.

  • If the contact does have an active Mailing Subscription - the Mailing Subscription is cancelled if the response is No.

The most likely way a contact will be unsubscribed from a mailing list is by them clicking on an unsubscribe link provided in a marketing email.

To add the unsubscribe link at the bottom of an email you send out:

This will insert the following text:

You will probably want to use the Font Size function available when creating a marketing email via the Messages - Message Text area, so your email creation process will look something like this:

Details of how to use the Messages - Message Text area are in lesson DM-7.

You won't need to use the unsubscribe link in emails sent out for a specific activity, as your attendees will be expecting to receive emails about an activity they have booked on.

The concept of subscribing to an email list is purely for promotional marketing and newsletter type of emails.

Viewing Subscriptions That Have Been Terminated

When you view the Mailing Subscriptions screen for a contact, to see if they have any subscriptions they have unsubscribed from:

Any cancelled subscriptions will be shown in the listing:

Creating Mailing Lists of Subscribed Contacts

When sending out marketing type of emails, you want to be sure you are only sending them to contacts who have subscribed to your mailing list.

To search for contacts who are on a mailing list:

This will select only the contacts who have signed up to your mailing list. You can then use the functions defined in lessons MC-3 or MC-5 to create and send your marketing email.

Summary

We have seen how a client's history of subscription to a mailing list is stored in a "Mailing Subscription". In this item, we can see when they subscribed, how they subscribed, and whether they have subsequently unsubscribed.

We have seen how to view the Mailing Subscriptions within a Contact's record, and how we can add new subscriptions and edit existing ones from this screen.

For contacts to sign up and unsubscribe we have seen how to create the sign up link for use in your marketing, and how to create an unsubscribe link within your marketing emails.

In the next lesson we will discuss the issues in linking to external email marketing tools.

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