Monitoring and responding to a contact's desire to stop receiving your messages is essential when automating communication. Proper opt-out handling protects your brand, is courteous to your audience, and keeps you compliant with CAN-SPAM laws and regulations. ProLine proactively manages contacts' opt-in status and automatically toggles it when a contact's desire to receive or not receive messages is clearly expressed.

ProLine tracks opt-in status separately on both your email and phone channels. This means that if a contact opts out of text messages from you, they will continue to receive emails from you as long as they are still opted-in on the email channel. Similarly, someone can opt out of your emails but still receive text messages from you.

The independent channel opt-out approach is necessary because some people will opt out of one channel but still want to hear from you on another. ProLine allows your contacts to choose where they want to receive messages from you by easily opting out of where they don't want to hear from you.

Contacts can opt out of emails from you by clicking the unsubscribe link added to your emails when you include the {{email_unsubscribe}} variable in your email templates. This variable is included in ProLine's email footer by default.

Contacts who have opted out will not receive any further automated emails from you via ProLine unless they opt back in. Opted-out contacts that progress to a Send Email step in a ProLine campaign still wait for the delay period for the step to elapse, but they skip the actual send email action when the step runs.

An important note is that we always redact the unsubscribe link when displaying email activity inside ProLine and replace it with [UNSUBSCRIBE LINK]. This keeps you or a team member from clicking the link and accidentally unsubscribing the contact. The link still shows in the actual email, which you can see in your connected email account's sent folder.

Contacts who have unsubscribed can also resubscribe using the same link. While the unsubscribe action occurs automatically when the link is clicked, resubscribing requires the contact to open the unsubscribe link and confirm that they wish to start receiving emails again.

Contacts who text you "stop" or "unsubscribe" are automatically opted out from receiving any kind of phone communication from you. ProLine also monitors for a list of phrases indicating opt-out intention, which includes but isn't limited to "stop texting me", "don't message me again", and "remove me from your list".

All phone communication is blocked for opted-out contacts. This includes manual text messages and calls. This is due to CAN-SPAM regulations, which forbid any further phone contact by your company after a recipient has opted out by text. Opted-out contacts that progress to a Send Text step in a ProLine campaign still wait for the delay period for the step to elapse, but they skip the actual send text message action when the step runs.

While ProLine does an excellent job detecting when a contact wants to opt-out, it isn't always perfect. It's important to double-check the opt-out status of a contact whenever they express a desire to stop receiving communication from you to ensure their status is correct.

You can change a contact's opt-in/opt-out status in two places. The first is in the Preview Next Step tool. Simply click the "Opt-in/Out" button to open and edit a contact's status across both email and phone channels. You can also manage opt-in/opt-out at the bottom of a contact's contact details area.

It is important to note that a contact opting out of emails and text messages does not automatically remove or pause them from their current campaign. This is because ProLine's campaigns can include many different types of actions, not just emails and texts (even if these are the most popular).

Contacts who have opted out of emails or texts will skip Send Email or Send Text steps, respectively. However, they will still wait for these steps' delays to elapse to maintain the campaign's intended cadence. Any other types of steps, such as Zapier Triggers, Send Direct Mail, or Integration triggers, will run as expected when a contact reaches them.

You can configure campaigns to move a contact to a different campaign (or to another part of the same campaign) on a response from the contact, but any kind of response will trigger this, not just negative responses. Click here to learn more about configuring campaign behavior.