Managing email subscriptions

Make sure you are familiar with the tools that Braze provides for managing user email subscriptions and targeting campaigns at users with particular subscription states. These tools are critical for compliance with anti-spam laws.

Unsubscribed email addresses

Braze will automatically unsubscribe any user that either manually unsubscribes from your email through a custom footer or marks an email as spam. These users won’t be targeted by future emails.

If a user unsubscribes and later changes their email, their new email will also be unsubscribed. In other words, after an external user ID is associated with an unsubscribe, future email addresses for that user ID will also be unsubscribed.

Bounces and invalid emails

Hard bounces can happen if the email is invalid or doesn’t exist. In this case, Braze will mark the user’s email address as invalid and will not attempt to send any further emails to that email address. If that user changes their email address, then we will resume sending emails to them since their new email may be valid. Soft bounces are automatically retried for 72 hours.

Duplicate emails

For duplicate emails, if one email unsubscribes, other profiles (up to 100 profiles) with that email address are updated to reflect the same subscription state. This applies for unsubscribes and other changes to subscription state, such as global email subscription state and individual subscription group statuses.

Braze automatically checks for and removes duplicate email addresses when an email campaign is sent. This way an email is only sent once and is “deduped” which checks that it doesn’t hit the same email multiple times even if multiple user profiles share a common address.

Because deduplication occurs when targeted users are included in the same dispatch, triggered campaigns (excluding API-triggered campaigns) may result in multiple sends to the same email address (even within a time period where users could be excluded due to reeligibility) if differing users with matching emails log the trigger event at different times.