Solution: 1 List / Multiple Email Content Types

nadworks

Active Member
I've been playing with this for a while and have found a solution that seems to work, combining the different MailWizz capabilities.

Example scenario:
You're running a Food topic email list. You send out a monthly newsletter with recipes, cooking tips, nutritional content etc, but you also send ad-hoc single-minded emails with special tips, and you send 6x Baking Specials per year and run a Vegan podcast, which you promote with a dedicated email every two weeks.

The problem:
You are running this from one single list, which makes sense, but you don't want unsubscribes to immediately remove users from ALL those different email types. You want to give users control over the type of emails they opt in or out of. However the subscribe form needs to be short and simple to maximise uptake (name and email address), which opts the subscriber into all of these email types by default. How can you give subscribers the control over unsubscribing from just the topics and email types they no longer want to receive while continuing to receive the stuff they like?

In MailWizz:
I tried a few things with the "change custom field upon link clicked" option to see if a multi tickbox field can be manipulated that way. Multiple tickboxes for the different types could be visible on the subscribers "Profile" page for self-selection, but would also need to be changed via a link clicked from the email. In addition, the default unsubscribe page should be able to display such a field.

Unfortunately, that's not possible in MW. The "change custom field upon link clicked" can only affect text fields and overwrite whatever was there before with a new value. It cannot add to or remove from existing ones.

The workaround solution:
This is not particularly sexy by any stretch, but it does the job for lists with a limited number of email types/topics and the logic is relatively simple. Here's a step-by-step

1. In Mailwizz to use for content segmentation
  • create a new custom field per content (email) type, i.e. newsletter, baking, podcast etc.
  • for new subscribers leave each field empty by default
  • in emails of each type, have 2 unsubscribe links in the footer:
    • A: unsubscribe from this email type (must have) – wording could be: unsubscribe from "Baking Ideas"
    • B: unsubscribe from all (optional) – wording could be: unsubscribe from all emails
  • Create a simple landing page for A, confirming the unsubscribe from the relevant email type and use its URL for A link
  • important: Add “change custom field value” when link A is clicked on campaign level, and set value to change to OUT
    (you can use anything you like here, but for the sake of the example, we use IN and OUT)
  • For B, set normal unsubscribe link
2. Create a segment for each email type
  • lookup the relevant custom field and include ANY where this field is either
    • [EMPTY]
    • or contains “IN” (see step 3 for why this is important)
  • This will exclude all who have opted out, but include those who are new (remember the default is an empty field) or have re-opted in as per the next step…
Now subscribers have control over which emails they don't want to receive anymore. The segments controlling this are now running and determining who we contact for each email type.

3. Allow subscribers back into an email type
  • To entice subscribers back into a specific email type, create a dynamic content module for your emails, promoting the email type these subscribers have opted out of, i.e. subscribers who have unsubscribed from the newsletter, but are still in for the podcast alerts.
  • Using the TWIG engine and [REMOTE_CONTENT] fields (see example below) we can show a dynamic podcast opt-in module only to subscribers who have the custom field for podcast-alerts set to OUT. All others will not see this module
  • in the module, add a link to “subscribe to podcast updates”
  • create a landing page to confirm the user’s new subscription (no need for a double opt-in, because they are already on the overall list)
  • important: Add “change custom field value” when link is clicked on campaign level, set to IN
    (this will now connect it to the segment in step 2)
For all future broadcasts of these email types, remember to select the correct segment to broadcast to. Sending to the entire list will not exclude email type unsubscribes and can lead to complaints.

The landing pages for the email type unsubscribes can make it very clear that other content will still be received. An idea might be to include a link to the non-dynamic unsubscribe form from those landing pages. Having a blanket unsubscribe field might be good practice, alternatively use the [PROFILE_URL] to also show a unsubscribe from all.

Dynamic content module for your email, driven by TWIG and MW custom fields:

Code:
{% if NEWS == 'OUT' %}
[REMOTE_CONTENT url='https://yourdomain/newsletter-optin-module.html']
{% else %}{% endif %}

This mean, if the custom field NEWS contains the value "OUT", add the remote module in this place. Otherwise do nothing. See example below.

RHtemplate.jpg


Not sure if this is helpful to anyone. It was a huge desire for me and my clients to come up with a solution. So, when we kind-of managed to figure it out, I thought I'd share it with the community. If anyone has a more elegant method to achieve this, please do chime in.
 
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