Create Unsubscribe Forms in Zoho CRM

To be fully compliant with email marketing regulations for anti SPAM purposes you need to allow recipients of your email marketing campaigns to be able to unsubscribe. This needs an unsubscribe form.

If you do not yet use email marketing software, which often has this built in as standard, and if you use Zoho CRM for your mass mailing, there is a useful but little known feature in Zoho CRM helps you to generate HTML code for an Unsubscribe Form.

You can use this form to provide an Unsubscribe option for your email recipients. The process to set up the form consists of three parts.

Step 1 - Generate an Unsubscribe Form

Click Setup > Website Integration > Unsubscription Form.

In the Unsubscription Form page, do the following: 

Enter a Return URL field.

Click Generate HTML.

A 'return URL' is the URL you want the unsubscriber to go to after unsibscibing, eg some sort of acknowledgement page, or a home page etc.

Step 2 - Publish an Unsubscribe Form

This step is to publish the unsubscribe form as a web page and provide a link to the web page from an email.

Create a web page in your website somewhere then paste the generated HTML code in the page.

Get the URL for the unsubscribe page that you created in your website.

Step 3 - Add an Unsubscribe link in the email template

Edit the email template you want to provide the Unsubscribe option.

In the Footer section type: "Click here to unsubscribe".

Select the View HTML source check box and type the subscription page's URL as shown in the format below:

Click <a href="http://www.yourwebsiteurl.com">here</a> to unsubscribe.

Click Save.

You now have an unsubscribe link and unsubscribe form.

How Does it Work?

This process will then automatically update the "email opt out" field as 'true' for the person unsubscribing, in the corresponding lead or contact record in the CRM.

You can then use this to filter on when doing mass mails, just one more criteria on views, eg. "Email Opt Out" is false. This will ensure no one who opted out, gets emailed.

If you use Zoho Campaigns, these leads or contacts will not be synchronised.

Zoho Campaigns also has its own unsubscribe function which is handled entirely by the software however. And the best part is that the unsubscribers are automatically updated in Zoho CRM to "Email Opt Out" is true.