About email marketing unsubscribes

Learn about how email unsubscribes work and how to manage email marketing permissions for your customers and leads in QuickBooks Online.

To stay compliant with local laws and regulations, your contacts must be able  to opt out of marketing communications at any time. Understanding how email unsubscribes affect what you can send—specifically the difference between marketing and transactional emails—helps you maintain a compliant relationship with your contacts.

What is an email unsubscribe?

An email unsubscribe signifies that a contact has withdrawn their consent to receive future marketing communications from you.This usually occurs when a contact clicks the "unsubscribe" link in an email you sent.

If a contactasks you directly to stop sending them marketing emails, you can manually update their subscription status in their profile.

Transactional vs. marketing emails

The type of email determines whether you need a contact's consent to send it.

• Marketing emails: These are promotional communications designed to generate sales or nurture leads. Consent is always required to send these emails.
• Transactional emails: These are essential business communications like invoices, receipts, and informational emails such as appointment reminders. You don’t need consent to send transactional emails. For instance, proposals are considered transactional email, which means you can send these without email marketing consent.

What happens when a contact unsubscribes?

If a contact unsubscribes from your email marketing, their subscription status changes to Unsubscribed. They’ll no longer receive marketing emails from you, but they’ll still receive transactional emails.

Manually manage a contact's email consent

You can manually update a customer or lead's email marketing permission status in their profile.

Note: Only primary admins/company admins and standard all access user types can edit the consent status of customers and leads.

1. Go to Customers & leads and select the Customers or Leads tab.
2. Select the name of the person you want to update to open their profile.
3. Select Edit.
4. Go to the Communication  permissions section.
5. If you are unsubscribing the contact, click Unsubscribe. Then, click Confirm unsubscribe. 
6. If you are resubscribing the contact:
   • You can only resubscribe a contact if you originally unsubscribed them.
   • You can’t resubscribe a contact if they unsubscribed themselves 
   • If resubscription is possible, click Subscribe. Then, click Confirm subscribe button.

Important: If you manually subscribe a contact, they won’t receive a sign-up confirmation email. Since you're adding this recipient manually, they won't have an opt-in date in your records, so be extra sure you have permission first.

About email subscription statuses 

A customer or lead's subscription status is indicated by a label in their profile. 

Related articles

The importance of email marketing consent