Opting out of channels

This guide describes the user journey of customers who want to unsubscribe from communications. For info on channel opt-ins please review our dedicated guide.

Web push

Chrome

Desktop

Users can unsubscribe by clicking on the padlock that appears on the URL bar > Site Settings > Notifications > Block. Alternatively, they can click on the the options menu > Settings> Site Settings > Notifications > find your website and select Block.

Mobile

On the upper right side of the website address bar, users can touch the options menu > Settings > Site Settings > Notifications find your website and select Block.

Firefox

Desktop

User can open the settings menu in Firefox by clicking three line menu > Preferences > Privacy and security > Notifications > Settings > select the website and click on Block.

Mobile

From their Android smartphone users can touch the options menu in the address bar (in some devices it shows on top and in others in the bottom) and navigate to Site Permissions > Exceptions > click on the name of your website > Block.

Safari

Users can unsubscribe by opening Safari preferences from the Safari menu > Preferences > Notifications, finding your website in the list of sites, and choosing Deny (instead of Allow).

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In all cases, removing the website from the site settings instead of blocking it will simply cause the visitor to be prompted again, the next time they visit your website.

Mobile push

Android

Users can opt-out by navigating to Settings > Apps > Notifications > Block all.

The exact path may change depending on the handset manufacturer and the Android OS version.

iOS

Navigate to Settings > Notifications > select the app > and toggle off the Allow notifications slider.

Email

If you use your own preference center, for example as part of the user account section of your website, see the section of this guide about how to link to this from your email.

Using Xtremepush preference center

You can use special syntax in your email campaigns to allow users to unsubscribe from emails. Review details in our email quick start guide. Clicking the link will take the recipient to an unsubscribe page where they will be able to opt out from email marketing. This page can be customised from the email settings page.

When a user unsubscribes to email by clicking on our preference center, the subscription status will be updated for that user profile (this can be reviewing by navigating to Data > Users and clicking on the user profile, under the section Channel > Subscriptions, and whenever you are sending a new email, unsubscribed users will be excluded from future sends. The system checks against the subscription status and also against suppression lists.

SMS

If you use your own preference center, for example as part of the user account section of your website, see the section of this guide about how to link to this from your SMS.

Using Xtremepush preference center

If you are not using a separate unsubscribe process then it is possible to automatically include an unsubscribe link at the very end of the message from the SMS tab. Review our SMS tab guide for more details.

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Legacy unsubscribe link

Xtremepush unsubscribe link was a new feature included in the April 2021 release. Your project may be configured with a gateway that automatically adds an opt out link to the bottom of your SMS message. This cannot be controlled from Xtremepush.

Clicking the link will take the recipient to an unsubscribe page where they will be able to opt out from SMS marketing. This page can be customised from the SMS settings page.

If you are using Vonage as your gateway, your users can also opt-out from SMS communications by sending the opt-out keyword to a specific number. The opt-out message and the keyword for each language can be configured from the SMS settings page.

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SMS opt out via message

This feature has been introduced in the July 2021 release. This solution is supported only for the gateway Vonage.

On site, in app, inbox channels

On-site, In-app and inbox channels have no outbound reach when users are not on your site and are a feature of your site or app that users only interact with when using it. As such, explicit opt-ins are not required for these channels and it isn't possible to opt out of them.

Using your own preference center

If you have your own preference center, you can link your email or SMS to it rather than using the Xtremepush unsubscribe link, so your system remains as the one source of truth.

This may not be possible if your preference page can only be accessed by logging in, as that won't satisfy the requirements to have a direct unsubscribe process.

If your preference page requires log-in, you should use the Xtremepush preference center instead. You can then sync unsubscribes in Xtremepush back to your system by using our profile subscription API. You could fetch data from this periodically (e.g. once per day, every 6 hours) so that your preference centre reflects the unsubscribes that have happened in Xtremepush.

If your preference center doesn't require log-in but you would like to make it only available to the correct user you could use our dynamic content capability to create a unique link per user.

In the example below you can use a unique email token (which you would pass as a profile attribute) to generate a unique link for each user profile:

https://www.yoursite.com/unsubscribe/{{user.email_token | url_escape}}

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Keeping subscription status up-to-date

If you are using your own preference page you need to make sure that you are pushing back this information into Xtremepush so that subscription preferences are updated in Xtremepush. Use our profile import API to do so.

Review subscription status

When a user unsubscribes to profile-based channels such email or SMS from the Xtremepush preference center, subscription status will be updated for that user profile (this can be reviewed by navigating to Data > Users and clicking on the user profile, under the section Channels > Subscriptions, and whenever you are sending a new email os SMS, unsubscribed users will be excluded from future sends.

In the case of device-based channels (such as web, mobile push) subscription status can be reviewed from Data > Devices > click on the Device ID > Push subscriptions or from Data > Users > click on the user profile > navigate to the section Channels > Push subscriptions. When a user that had opted in for push removes the permission for push notifications, the Push addressable status for the device will be updated to false once that Xtremepush receives feedback from the gateway that a campaign has failed for that device.

For any campaign, the system checks against the subscription status, addressability status and also against suppression lists.

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Suppression lists

Users that unsubscribe from channel communications don't get automatically added to suppression lists. These don't get automatically updated, but can be updated manually, or in bulk. See our guide on suppression lists for further details.