Remove unsubscribers from an autoresponder

How do I remove contacts with cancelled subscriptions from an autoresponder?

There are a lot of things you can do with your unsubscribers, such as:

Attempt to reactivate their engagement to your program
Offer other products they might be interested in instead
Add them to the suppression list altogether

… and so on.

Here is a possible scenario:

You have an autoresponder (Active Members) that serves as a newsletter for active members of your organization.

You want to filter the contacts who unsubscribed to that autoresponder (Active Members) and move them to another autoresponder (Inactive Members) you’ve just set up in an attempt to eventually reactivate their engagement to your organization.

This is how to do it:

1. Create the Inactive Members destination autoresponder (See How to create autoresponders)

2. Filter your contacts to show only those that unsubscribed to the Active Members autoresponder

You can either click on the ‘Unsubs‘ count:

… or choose ‘Unsubscribed‘ / Active Members from the ‘Filter‘ menu on the Contacts list screen:

3. Once the filter is in place, click on the ‘I want to…‘ drop-down menu and select ‘Edit matching contacts

4. On the ‘Edit Matching Contacts‘ screen, select the following under the ‘Subscription‘ section:

  • For autoresponder: Active Members (the originating autoresponder – where you are removing them from)
  • Move to this autoresponder: Inactive Members (the destination autoresponder – where you are transferring them to)
  • Last message sent: 0 (so they’ll begin their subscription to the destination autoresponder from the beginning)
  • Status: Active
  • Change all the other fields as necessary and save your changes

Once done, the unsubscribers from the Active Members autoresponder will already be on the Inactive Members autoresponder:

Tip! If you want to preserve the status of their subscriptions to the originating autoresponder (Active Members) for records purposes, you may simply add a new subscription to the destination autoresponder (Inactive Members) instead of moving them out of the originating autoresponder. To do so, simply use the ‘Trigger Action for matching contacts‘ feature (See How to update contacts in bulk).