Help · Audience

Consent

Consent is permission to send marketing. It is the person's own answer, not your setting — which is why nothing in the app lets you type a new answer on their behalf.

Consent is recorded per channel. A profile carries one row for Email and one for Text messages, and they move independently. Email is the channel this app sends today.

The four states

On a profile, that last state reads "No consent recorded" rather than "never subscribed": silence is not a decision the person made, and showing it as one would be putting words in their mouth. In the segment builder the same state is offered as Never subscribed, because there it is a question you are asking of your own people rather than a claim on their record.

Do not email, and why it is permanent

Do not email is the one state that cannot be undone — not by you, not by support, not by re-importing the address. Once an address is in it, no email you send through this app will ever go to it again.

That is the point. Every reason an address lands here is a reason that continuing to mail it damages you: mail that bounced, mail somebody reported as spam, an address that is not a real mailbox, or a person who asked to be removed for good. A permanent block is what keeps a handful of bad addresses from quietly wrecking whether your good mail arrives at all.

Beside the state, the app names the reason:

Older records made before reasons were kept show the state with no reason beside it.

Privacy request is the reason with no bounce or complaint behind it: the person asked to be erased. What an erasure removes from their record, and the one thing it deliberately leaves behind, is on the Profiles page.

If what you want is a temporary stop — park a group for a season, then mail them in Q4 — that is not this. That is Pause, which is reversible and leaves consent untouched.

Where consent comes from

Consent arrives from your store, and from the signup forms you build here. The app records it as it happened:

• a signup form of yours — somebody filling one in and submitting it is their consent. There is no second step and nothing to wait for;
• the marketing consent box at checkout, and whatever your store's own forms and account pages record;
• the unsubscribe link in every marketing email you send, which writes Unsubscribed;
• the Resubscribe button on that same unsubscribe page, which writes Subscribed;
• a permanent bounce or a spam report on mail you sent, which writes Do not email with its reason;
• an address your store marks as invalid, which writes Do not email too.

A form signup is consent on its own. Some tools send a "click here to confirm" email before they will treat a signup as real. This one does not need to, because it checks the address at the moment it is typed rather than asking the person to prove themselves twice — see Verified identity.

Somebody who unsubscribed and then fills in one of your forms is subscribed again. Typing an address into a form is that person saying they want your email, and it is the most recent thing they have said — so it is what the app records, whatever the profile said before. That holds however the older Unsubscribed got there: their own press on an unsubscribe link, your store telling us they were never subscribed, or you marking it by hand.

Except for an address in Do not email, which nothing can undo. A permanent bounce, a spam report, or an address your store marks invalid puts somebody in Do not email, and no form can take them back out of it. That one is final everywhere in this product, and a form that is filled in for such an address is answered exactly as any other — nothing is written, and the person filling it in learns nothing about whose address it is.

Text messages work the other way round, and on purpose. A typed number is not treated as consent to text: a form can be filled in by anybody, and on that channel there is a stronger proof available — the six-digit code the person types back from the handset in their hand. Email has no equivalent that does not cost somebody a message they never asked for. See Text messages.

What a form may write at all. A form fills blanks; it does not overwrite what you already know. If your store has a first name for somebody, a form cannot change it — that comes from your store, where the person signs in as themselves. The same goes for a telephone number, and more strictly: a form never replaces a number you already have, a blank one is filled at the moment we text the six-digit code, and the number only becomes textable once that code comes back.

Somebody who unsubscribed can also subscribe again themselves, with one press on your unsubscribe page. That is their own decision on the day they make it, and their profile then shows Subscribed again. An address in Do not email is different: the button never appears for it, and nothing anywhere in this product can bring it back. What that button looks like, and whether you offer it at all, is on the Unsubscribe page screen in Settings.

Two consequences worth knowing. Recording somebody's consent by hand is deliberately a narrow door — the menu on each consent row, one confirmed sentence, and your name kept beside it; see Profiles. And a later answer does not overwrite an earlier one just by arriving late: if two records reach the app out of order, the one that actually happened later wins.

Consent travels back to your store

It goes both ways. The app reads the consent your store holds and honors it, and when somebody opts out here, that withdrawal is written back to their customer record in your store straight away.

That covers the two ways an opt-out starts with us:

• somebody uses the unsubscribe link in a marketing email you sent;
• an address hard-bounces or somebody reports one of your emails as spam.

Both write Unsubscribed on the customer record in your store. Your store has no equivalent of Do not email, so a bounce or a spam report lands there as an unsubscribe — the full reason stays here, on the profile, and the address is still never emailed again by this app whatever your store says later.

Why it matters: without this, someone could unsubscribe from your email and still look subscribed everywhere else you look, and another app reading your store would go on treating them as fair game. The point is that no other surface can re-promise what somebody has already revoked.

This needs permission to update customers in your store, which you are asked for when you install or update the app. It is used for consent and for nothing else — no other detail on a customer is ever touched.

If your store is unreachable when an opt-out happens, the opt-out still stands here immediately, and the app keeps trying to pass it on. The person is unsubscribed the moment they ask, whether or not your store has caught up.

Subscribing does not travel the same way. Only a withdrawal is written back to your store. Saying somebody wants your email is a claim about them, and it is not this app's to make on a customer record you own. So a person who unsubscribed, and later filled in one of your forms, is Subscribed here and still reads unsubscribed in your store's admin — and stays that way until they change it there. It is worth knowing before you compare the two screens and think one of them is wrong.

Consent and sending

Consent is checked at send time, for every email you send. Not when the audience was built, not when the segment was counted — every time, for every recipient, immediately before the message goes.

That is why a segment's count and the number of people a send reaches are not the same number, and why the members preview on a segment says so. Being in a segment has never been a claim that anybody will be emailed. Segments are questions about who your people are; consent is the answer about who may hear from you.

Marketing consent governs marketing mail. It does not touch the emails your store sends about an order somebody placed.

Where you see it

• The Consent column on the profiles screen, and the Consent filter beside the search box.
• The Channel consent block on a profile's own page — one row per channel, with the state, the reason, and the day it was recorded, in your store's time zone.
• The Email consent condition in the segment builder, which can ask for subscribed, unsubscribed, or never subscribed.