As an email marketer, you may have noticed chatter about One-Click Unsubscribes. Both Gmail and Yahoo have recently implemented measures to ensure that bulk email senders provide an easy, visible one-click option to unsubscribe within all promotional emails. For those companies that send more than 5,000 emails per day to Gmail accounts, Google now requires compliance with this standard. Additionally, Gmail and Yahoo are tightening up their enforcement of spam protection and will factor the inclusion or exclusion of one-click unsubscribes into spam and reputation scores for email senders. (Be sure to check out our blog on spam score management.)

With these new requirements, email marketers will want to be sure they are including these options if they are frequently sending to Gmail and Yahoo accounts. Easy unsubscribe options are beneficial to email recipients for obvious reasons—they no longer receive emails they aren’t interested in, without having to travel to that website to unsubscribe. But it also helps your email marketing metrics, too, by ensuring your emails are only sent to interested parties, therefore improving things like open rate and clickthrough rate, along with your reputation and spam scores. 

For businesses using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys (formerly Dynamics 365 Marketing), ensuring compliance is super simple. In addition to the normal subscription center links with which you are probably familiar, Microsoft has added a new one-click unsubscribe feature. 

Turn on one-click unsubscribe

The one-click unsubscribe setting is super quick and easy to turn on. You may need to reach out to your CRM administrator to do so, however. While in the Marketing app, use the area picker at the bottom of the left navigation to switch to the settings area. In the settings navigation, find “Feature Switches” towards the top under the Overview section. Scroll down a bit and you should find this One-click unsubscribe option. If you aren’t seeing it, your marketing app might need to be updated. 

After toggling the switch on, be sure to hit the save button in the very top right—it’s pretty easy to miss. 

With this on, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys will add a little bit of extra data to the emails it sends that will allow most of the commonly used email clients to provide their own unsubscribe link, which might appear at the top of an email or as a popout notification, like in the example below. For those that are curious, emails will include “list-unsubscribe” and “list-unsubscribe-post” headers. 

And that’s it! The one-click unsubscribe will populate in email clients with no further work on your part, no added code to any email.  

One-click unsubscribe in Real-time vs Outbound areas

The function of this unsubscribe will vary slightly between Real-Time Journeys and the Outbound Marketing modules. With Outbound, it’ll function as a normal full unsubscribe link and toggle the “Do Not Allow Bulk Emails” field to “Do Not Allow,” thereby preventing all commercial emails from being sent to the contact.

In Real-Time Journeys, consent is enforced at the contact point level (aka each individual email address, phone number, or custom channel has its own contact consent set). Therefore, the unsubscribe will only apply to the brand purpose (ex. Commercial or specific topic) that was used for that email send. Other brand purposes may continue to be used for that contact.  

As a note, this does not affect the functionality of subscription centers (in Outbound) or preference centers (in Real-Time). Those will still allow contacts to freely unsubscribe from specific lists or all emails entirely. Those links will still be required to exist in your emails. 

One-click unsubscribes seem to be pretty important for future email marketing campaigns, so be sure get yourself set up. Reach out to us at Syvantis if you need assistance getting the feature switch turned on!