Notes on keeping email permissions up-to-date

Triggered emails that are sent to your customers after a purchase, if they abandon a cart, or if there's a price drop, can be valuable—but you need to be aware of some possible issues. As you probably know, and as we have written about here, there are strict rules about who you are allowed to send to, all depending on whether or not the customer has given explicit consent to receive promotional emails from you.

Hello Retail is not responsible for handling this consent, and it is entirely up to you to make sure you comply with the regulations.  Although the triggered emails are sent from Hello Retail, it is your responsibility to ensure that the list of permissions in Hello Retail's system is up to date. If not, you risk sending an automatically triggered email to a customer that has withdrawn a consent given at an earlier point in time. Therefore, the permission list must reflect the actual permissions granted by the customers.

Auto synchronisation of email permissions

Most likely, the platform you use to handle permissions is the same you use for newsletters. A lot of those platforms allow for automatic synchronisation of email permissions with Hello Retail's database. We recommend you set up this synchronisation, as it will ensure an updated list. You can see guides on how to set up permission synchronization on an extensive list of platforms here.

Please be aware, that the synchronisation is only from newsletter provider to Hello Retail - not the other way. Therefore, if the customer clicks the unsubscribe link in a promotional email sent from Hello Retail, this information will not be reflected in your own permission list. Hello Retail keeps a list of unsubscribed customers under Triggered Emails -> Settings -> Unsubscribed email addresses. You can download the list and use it to update your own permissions.

A better way to keep the list of unsubscribed customers updated, is to let the unsubscribe link redirect to your newsletter platform's unsubscribe form. That way, your own permission list is automatically updated and Hello Retail's list will automatically update when the list is synchronised. You can configure the redirect under Triggered Emails -> Settings -> Custom unsubscribe redirect. We have an example of how to set it up with Mailchimp here.

Manual upload of permission list

If you are not using the newsletter platforms listed here,  where you can synchronise the permission list automatically, it is possible to upload a list manually. We have a guide on how to do that here. If you do this, it is entirely up to you to update this list regularly to make sure the list is up to date. If not, you can risk sending emails to customers who have withdrawn their permission since the last update.

To be clear, the following scenario can happen:

• A customer has given you permission, and you upload a list containing that customer to Hello Retail.
• The customer then withdraws the permission, but an updated list has not been uploaded to Hello Retail.
• Hello Retail will not be aware that the customer should not receive promotional emails.
• If the customer receives a promotional email, it will violate the current regulations, and you risk a fine.

If you upload permission lists manually, you should have a schedule or automatic reminder that ensure you upload an updated list regularly. We recommend that you set up an automatic permission synchronisation, if possible.