Do I need an Email Opt-Out
For my MVP, I created a service that sends users emails regularly on various activities i.e. a user responding to one of their posts. I'm wondering if I need to add an opt-out option like with regular email marketing subscriptions. Thanks for any insights!
If you don't give me an unsubscribe button I hit the spam button is all I'm saying
Email reputation is a slippery slope
I agree, but it is still different to make it convenient for a user to stop receiving emails in regard to a post for example (make it easy to unpublish post) or to require complete email opt out from inside an automated email.
Some provide multiple unsubscribe link for multi context due it might start to get confusing...
If in place you provide a "manage your email preference" link, I like you less, but consider if valid and you just incompetent so I wouldn't mark it spam.
Just talking tongue and cheek, not personally addressed.
I might represent only a tiny population of users as a techie who worked with mailing systems..
I think I want to build things like user preferences out once I've validated my idea. I have been working on my project for little less than two months part-time and am really just trying to get users to use it asap.
There's two kinds of emails: bulk and transactional.
Bulk email is the industry term for any kind of email where the same(ish) message is sent to a list of people because the sender decides to send that message. That's basically all marketing email, customer/product updates, and similar things. Legally, these emails are required to include an opt-out link.
Transactional email is an email sent by an application or system based on a user-intended action. Things like activity notifications and digests, messaging systems between users of the system, etc. Legally, these kinds of emails do NOT require an opt-out link, but if you don't give people a way to change their notification intervals (or stop them entirely) you run the risk of people marking your emails as spam to stop unwanted emails, which will hurt your overall delivery rates and possibly even get you kicked off your email provider. The best practice is to include a link directly to a "notification preferences" type screen in your app to allow people to adjust the intervals, but this can be much more more granular than the legally-required "complete opt out" links required by law on marketing emails.
Postmark has a great page with info about these differences and what's required to keep your delivery rates high: https://postmarkapp.com/blog/bulk-vs-transactional
Hope this helps!
All the other answers are great, but this is the EXACT answer I was looking for - thanks!
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Hey @borzi, for sure you'll need to make it easy for your customers top opt out. Not just to meet privacy regulations but because I would suspect customers would want those controls.
Good advice, thanks!