Use Publications for Unsubscriptions
If you use Gmail or Yahoo to send over 5,000 emails in a 24-hour period, your marketing and promotional bulk emails must be compliant with their one-click unsubscribe requirement. SendGrid offers unsubscribe through subscription tracking, but this is an all-or-nothing feature, meaning an individual will unsubscribe from all communication if they unsubscribe from one email.
Instead, you can use Publications to send different types of emails. That way, if someone doesn't want to receive that type of email, they can unsubscribe from only that specific Publication when they use the SendGrid Unsubscribe link.
- The Message that recipients receive includes the Publication ID.
- SendGrid looks for the relevant Group based on that Publication ID.
- If there is no Group with the Publication ID, it creates a new Group.
- If there are already 200 Groups (the SendGrid maximum), your email will send but it won't associate to the Publication. Then, if you enable subscription tracking, the recipient can use the Unsubscribe link, but it affects all Messages you send (since it isn't associated with a Publication). If you don't enable subscription tracking, the recipient can't unsubscribe and your email isn't compliant.
- The Group ID is associated with the email that you sent.
- If a recipient clicks the Unsubscribe link in the email, the Group ID is sent to MinistryPlatform.
- The Platform locates the Contact ID and Publication ID and updates the Unsubscribe field for that Contact, for that Publication.
Best Practices & Examples
There are many different ways churches can communicate with their congregations. Still, we can provide some guidelines to help you communicate in a way that better meets your expectations.
- Start small. Set up a few Publications that cover most of your communications. For example, you might have one Publication for Church Announcements and one for Small Group Communications.
- Use widgets. The One-Click Unsubscribe widget and the My Subscriptions widget give your congregants more ways to control what they receive. Including these widgets in your email will NOT meet the Gmail or Yahoo requirements, but it will make things easier and better for you and your email recipients.
- Only send a message to one publication at a time. That way, a recipient's unsubscription request updates the correct Publication in MinistryPlatform.
- See who unsubscribes from a publication. You can see who was unsubscribed from a publication via SendGrid's group unsubscription. Open the Publication record, click the Subscribers tab, and select the Unsubscribed view. You can also add your own views using the Updated By and Updated On Behalf Of fields.
Publication Unsubscriptions FAQ
Anyone who sends large numbers of emails using Gmail or Yahoo. The first time you send over 5,000 emails in a 24-hour period, you'll need to comply with these standards. Note that transactional emails, like password reset and task notifications, are excluded from these requirements.
Yes, but... When you enable the SendGrid subscription tracking, an Unsubscribe link is automatically inserted into all of your emails (at the bottom, by default). However, this is a global Unsubscribe link. So, if the message was not sent through a publication and someone clicks that global Unsubscribe link, they will no longer receive any messages that you send from MinistryPlatform. In order to limit unsubscriptions to a certain group of emails, you'll want to use publications.
Gmail's email sender guidelines say that message recipients, not Google, determine the nature of the messages they receive.
Since we're all about "your church, your way", it's hard to share a one-size-fits-all recommendation. But using publications for bulk emails is a good way to help your recipients manage which emails they receive from you. Check out our best practices for guidance, and try the MinistryPlatform Community to see what's working for others.
When you send messages through a publication, the email recipient's experience will be similar when they use the One-Click Unsubscribe widget or the Unsubscribe link in the email. Both ways let the user know that they have been unsubscribed from the publication, and both ways update the Platform.
Users must log in to manage their subscriptions in the My Subscriptions widget. All publications where the Available Online field is set to Yes will be visible in the widget. If you use publications to add the Unsubscribe link to bulk emails and you don't want users to opt-in to this on their own, set the Available Online field to No.
Q6: Can I change the position or text of the Unsubscribe link in emails?
- Go to .
- Open the Publication Unsubscribe link record, and click Edit Record.
- Edit the link in the text box or using the HTML editor.
- Click Save.
- Go to , and select your publication.
- From the Actions menu, select Message. Then, write your message as usual.
- In the message body, place your cursor where you want your unsubscribe link to be.
- From the Insert menu, select Snippets then Publication Unsubscribe link.
- Review your message. When you're ready, send your message as usual.
When the subscriber gets the message, they'll see the unsubscribe link you added. If they click it, they'll see an opt out message along with the name of the publication they unsubscribed from.
Q7: I changed the wording of my Unsubscribe links under the Subscription Tracking section in SendGrid. Why do emails I send through Publications still show the default wording?
The settings available under Subscription Tracking only affect how the global Unsubscribe link, referred to in Q2, displays in emails. Publications prioritize using the group Unsubscribe link instead. To change the text of the link in publications, you'll need to use a Group Unsubscribe Substitution tag. Refer to Q6 for steps to do that.
SendGrid limits unsubscription tracking to 200 publications. We are working with SendGrid to explore options for those who need to use over 200 publications.
If a recipient unsubscribes using the global link, you'll need to update the SendGrid Global Unsubscription list so they can receive emails again. Just updating their Bulk Email Opt Out field or adding subscriptions back will not update SendGrid's information for that recipient.
In SendGrid, under the Activity Feed, you can use Advanced Search to find recent Group Unsubscribes in a certain date range or by group name. Your search may look like this, for example:
Then, you can compare that information with the records in the Unsubscribed view on the All Subscriptions page in MinistryPlatform.
Subscription tracking is not automatically enabled when you send emails via Publications. The unsubscribe group is still generated and any recipients included in the publication email will receive the Unsubscribe link that pertains to the group. In other words, you can use Group Unsubscribe when sending publications, and it will not enable global unsubscription for all other messages.