Your software
My Mautic version is: 4.0.1
My PHP version is: 7.4
My Database type and version is: 10.3.31-MariaDB-0ubuntu0.20.04.1
Your problem
My problem is: This stems from a different problem which is that Mautic doesn’t have an out-of-the-box feature to easily send emails to contacts immediately after a form fill when in “queue mode.” Searching the forum I found that it is possible to do so by selecting “send form results” when building the form, but frankly that is a clunky solution. Have added my vote to the feature request for improvements on this. Seems like a pretty no-brainer grade improvement IMO.
Anyhow, the problem or bug I am seeing is that after setting up the form with “send form results” – while the feature works and does send the email as expected – it appears that Mautic appends the wrong contact id string when generating the unsubscribe request when i click the links generated from either {unsubscribe_url} or {unsubscribe_text} in emails that process normally through the email generated by the form fill. I am getting “Record not found.” error.
Tested other email and the contact preference center is working normally, but I did see that in the regular emails that the unsubscribe links generate a different id string in the request.
To be clear I’m not sending test email, this is clicking the actual email sent from the form > send form results email in a live environment.
Interesting. The submit form results email is a transactional class email. I think noone expect to unsubscribe from it. Even if you would unsubscribe, you would get this mail again upon form submit.
Here is a video about transactional vs marketing emails:
Do you know a different way to send immediate emails when using queue? I have to say, I am really struck that this is not baked into Mautic as a basic feature. Coming from Marketo, Hubspot and Sharpspring, this is by far the most used feature of all my marketing automation clients – user filling a form to receive gated content, and then delivering that gated content immediately.
I suppose we should be using “immediate” for our setups then? But what about clients that also have large lists and need to process 30k emails at a time for a newsletter etc? Shouldn’t they be in queue?
You can set “asset download” action after successful form submission. There is nothing faster then that.
You can also set your cron to every minute (after some optimization.) to make the content is delivered fast. If you have 30k emails, don’t do immediate send, use a queue.
BTW - why to add the unsubscribe on the first content they asked? They JUST subscribed
It’s not like you are sending them a message, but they are requesting one from you.
You can also solve this by
adding a successful unsubscribe landing page
start a campaign after form send and make a decision: did the person visit the unsub page? If yes, then add do not contact
Solution 2:
you can add the successful unsubscribe landing page
create a segment, where you filter for URL from email. Filter for your unsub page url.
Thanks for these workarounds, @joeyk. I’ll work something out and hope that we can get something added that makes this easier in a future version.
On the topic of including unsubscribe links, the main reason to include a link on all communications is because it is required by law. I don’t know the law everywhere around the world but certainly CAN-SPAM in US and CASL in Canada require this, as well as a straightforward interpretation of GDPR.
Many of the major MA platforms now make it impossible to remove the unsub links in email footers. IMO Mautic should consider adopting this also–make people set this up as a required part of creating emails.
But frankly it’s a best practice, if not standard marketing ethics and solid user experience practice to give this control to our recipients at all times. It’s not our job to decide when and where someone on the receiving end would want to unsubscribe, even if it is after the first communication. Not possible to know what is going on in their minds or why they would do so, but it is always their right to have this control whether they exercise it or not.
Normally I would agree with you I am the biggest supporter of unsubscribes. When I did bulk marketing in the US, I used to add unsubscribe at the top and the bottom of the marketing messages.
You compared Mautic to other MA software, but the comparison is not accurate. Any other cloud solution will of course safeguard their own domain/ip/business reputation because it’s theirs that is on the line. With Mautic you can only hurt yourself if you are not spam can act compliant. And this is not only Mautic. Many self hosted apps will let you decide the nature of your communication and let you use transactional and marketing emails separately (Sendy / Mailwizz just to name 2 popular ones).
Mautic is not a ‘mailer’ tool, but it can be used as one. We have clients who use it for communication between schools teachers and pupils, or banks that send transactional emails to clients. It would be not only bad but even illegal if we would offer the option to unsubscribe.
Creating your own unsubscribe or double opt-in are both simple tasks with Mautic, that are easy to create thanks to the flexibility that offers.
There are many ways you can offer unsubscribe in the form action and I’m very excited to see your solution as well.
