Each Contact profile includes a Subscription status property that you can map to your forms and use in Automation workflows to trigger email communications to your target audience.
To make sure that you’re compliant with legal requirements, always provide clear opt-out options and get explicit consent from your respondents. You can check out our email marketing compliance checklist here.
You can select and edit the Subscription status property in the following ways:
- By mapping your form responses to Contact properties
- By manually creating or updating a Contact
- By importing Contacts from a CSV file
The Subscription status of a Contact can be the following:
- Subscribed: This indicates that the contact has explicitly consented (i.e., opted-in) to receive email marketing communications and has not opted-out. The contact can receive email marketing communications.
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Unsubscribed: The contact has explicitly opted out of receiving email marketing communications. The contact is unable to receive email marketing communications.
- Implications: Contacts with Unsubscribed Subscription status will NOT receive any contact communication in any workflow until they are re-subscribed (but they should continue to trigger workflows as usual).
You can map your form responses to the Subscribed, Unsubscribed, and Never subscribed subscription status when mapping questions in your form to contact properties. Find out more about mapping form questions to contact properties here.
- Never subscribed: The contact has not explicitly consented (i.e., opted-in) to receive email marketing communications and has not opted-out either. The contact is unable to receive email marketing communications.
Note: If the CSV file you’re importing doesn’t have a Subscription status column header, the Subscription status of Contacts imported from a CSV file will be Never subscribed. You can find instructions on updating the subscription status of contacts imported from a CSV file here.
You might also see a fourth, non-editable subscription status in your Contacts table:
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Suppressed: The contact has hard bounced or repeatedly soft bounced.
- A suppressed contact has a non-deliverable email address, which might be misspelled or invalid.
- The contact is unable to receive any type of communication.
- This Subscription status value CANNOT be edited.
- When a contact is cleaned for email, they cannot receive any messages even if they have provided consent and indicated they want to receive emails.
Try to avoid sending emails to undeliverable addresses to protect your sender reputation and reduce the risk of emails being marked as spam.
The subscription status of a contact can become Suppressed for the following reasons:
- An email hard bounced: A hard bounce occurs when an email cannot be delivered due to a permanent reason. This can be caused by a variety of reasons, including a misspelled email address or a deliberate block by the email server. A hard bounce signals a permanent email delivery issue, so Typeform will automatically suppress these contacts to help ensure lists stay clean.
- An email soft bounced more than 7 consecutive times: A soft bounce occurs when an email cannot be delivered due to a temporary reason. For example, a recipient's inbox may be full or the server may be down. If an email soft bounces more than 7 times in a row, it indicates that this is a consistent issue. To prevent continual soft bounces, Typeform will suppress email addresses that soft bounce more than 7 times consecutively. Only soft bounces within the past 2 years are considered for this count.