The standard Unsubscribe Link supports a fairly efficient method for allowing Contacts to remove themselves from your Lists. One click and the Contact is quickly and immediately removed from one or all the Lists in your Realm.

Some customers have asked for a unsubscribe link that goes to a confirmation page - giving Contacts a chance to decide whether they truly want to leave a List. Advanced Unsubscribe Control is available with a listunsub link - designed to give you lots of flexibility when it comes to presenting opt-out links to your subscribers. You will be able to:

• Use your own forms (and display any information about a subscriber you desire)
• Specify the text that appears inside the accept and cancellation buttons
• Specify landing pages for successes, cancellations, and failures

Simple Usage

The easiest way to use this is to include a tag similar to the following in one of your templates or articles:

<a href="http://whatcounts.com/bin/listunsub?id=%%SUBSCRIBER_ID_TAG%%">Unsubscribe</a>

When one of your subscribers clicks on this link, they'll be taken to a default confirmation page asking them to confirm whether they truly want to remove themselves from your list.

They can press the accept or OK button to remove themselves or a cancel button. If they press the OK button, they'll see a confirmation page. If they press the cancel button, they'll see a page indicating that no action was taken on their behalf.

Using Your Own Forms

Suppose you'd like to use your own form to display your confirmation message. Perhaps you'd like to display the subscriber's email address. Here's how to do it:

• Create an HTML page on your company's public web site using the template below
• Add &envelope=your HTML page's URL to the listunsub command

Here's an example given the URL http://mycompany.com/custom_form.html (note that we've broken the URL into two lines for reading convenience):

http://whatcounts.com/bin/listunsub?id=%%SUBSCRIBER_ID_TAG%%&envelope=http://mycompany.com/custom_form.html

When the listunsub program does its job, it will actually go out and grab the page custom_form.html from the web site http://mycompany.com and use it to display a message to your subscriber.

Form Template

In order for your custom forms to work, they have to adhere to a few structural standards. Here's a simple example with a one sentence message for the end-user, which you are free to change and/or stylize any way you like.

<form action="http://whatcounts.com/bin/listunsub" method=post>
<input type=hidden name=cmd value=user>
<input type=hidden name=id value="%%$id%%">
<input type=hidden name=goto value="%%$goto%%">
<input type=hidden name=cancel value="%%$cancel_goto%%">
<input type=hidden name=cancel_label value="%%$cancel_button%%">

You have requested that %%$email%% be removed from this list.

<BR>
<input type=submit name=submit_label 
value="%%$cancel_button%%">
<input type=submit name=submit_label 
value="%%$ok_button%%">

You may notice several tags that look like template tags. Probably %%$email%% will look familiar. Any tag that you would normally use inside a template can be used in your custom form - even template logic. However, these custom forms do not support articles.

The tags %%$id%%, %%$goto%%, %%$cancel_goto%%, etc. are all set automatically - either from additional settings you pass in your link or values set by default. The next section talks about these features.

Link Commands

The following command or arguments can be appended to your listunsub link to control how the program works.

Shortcuts

Everyone has their preferences for commands. So, we've created some aliases. Here they are:

Unicode

If your custom forms contain Unicode, you'll want to specify &unicode=1 somewhere with your listunsub link so that we properly read and interpret your form.

Security

Although the %%SUBSCRIBER_ID_TAG%% is encrypted and designed to be non-sequential in nature, it's highly advisable that you do not attempt to display too much information about a subscriber inside your custom form using template tags. Keep it simple and short. A person clicking on your listunsub link already knows their first name, last name, etc. Don't make this resource attractive for abuse.