# What happens when someone opts out

An unsubscribe feels like a loss, and it is the opposite — the person who can't get off your list marks you as spam instead. In this video we send ourselves a marketing email, look at the two ways out of it, click the unsubscribe link on camera, and follow that one address into Bird's suppression list. Then the part that actually protects your reputation: the next marketing email to that address is rejected, and a transactional one still lands in the inbox.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymMVzq2GJLo (3:55)

## What we cover

- Why an unsubscribe or bounce adds someone to suppressions
- Where to check if a recipient is suppressed
- Removing someone from the suppression list

## Transcript

_Auto-generated from the video._

Hey, it's Bob. Um, here today with another just quick video. I want to talk to you about unsubscribe pages. Um, whenever you send out a marketing email, it's important that you have an unsubscribe page uh to give your customers the option to unsubscribe from your marketing emails.

And when you navigate the email within the dashboard, we have unsubscribe pages here on the left-hand side. Um, so in the current version, we've got a quite straightforward unsubscribe uh template ready that you can customize towards your brand colors. Um, we can set the sender name. And then we can set up our brand colors. Now, with every Aviary, we've got a lovely blue background. And our icon is uh bright red.

I'm not a designer, so my apologies. And then we can just open up the example and see what customers will be seeing. Um, like I said, this is just the first version of the unsubscribe page. Um, extended versions are coming quite soon, but this at least gives you the option to customize it a bit.

All right. I've uh opened up a uh marketing email that we've used in one of our earlier videos for uh discounted purchase. And if we scroll down here, we see the unsubscribe button. So, what actually happens when a customer clicks it? So, when you open up unsubscribe, um and be mindful that this is before we made the changes, I correctly land on the unsubscribe page. I'm stop receiving, and then we unsubscribe. And here we can actually see the updated unsubscribe page as uh shared before.

Um, so what actually happens to my contact now? So, I'm going to close this window. I'm going to go back into the dashboard, and I'm going to head to suppressions. And there we see. So, the reason why I'm currently suppressed is because I'm unsubscribed because of the unsubscribe link. This enables me to automatically block out marketing material to this sender.

So let's actually have a look and test this ourselves. All right. So I've opened up just a quick new session. Um, I'm going to have the Bird CLI send a marketing email to We're going to have our agents trying to send out a marketing email and let's see what the uh the status is.

All right, and it's about finishing up right now. Let me just have a quick look at what it all did. So here we can see that our agent has sent an email to my email that was just suppressed. So it went through all of the normal protocols. Um, it found uh marketing emails and it found marketing templates. It actually sent and it identified that the send was failed. So it actually found out why that rejection reason was that the recipient is suppressed. So no marketing email had been sent.

So what we can do is now also try sending a uh transactional email and see how that goes. All right, and it just processed the email and I can showcase that my transactional email is correctly received. So this just confirms that suppressions don't impact um transactional emails.

They're only impacting the uh marketing emails. And here you can see I'm still as a suppressed contact. Um, so yeah, that's how suppressions work and how you can make use of your unsubscribe page. If you've got any further questions, our support team is more than happy to do it. Um, and of course happy sending.

## More Email guides

- [Getting started with email](/en-au/learn/email/email-setup) — 3:30
- [How to build an email template](/en-au/learn/email/email-template) — 7:35
- [Schedule an email to send later](/en-au/learn/email/email-schedule) — 2:28
- [Send 100 emails in one API call](/en-au/learn/email/email-batches) — 2:36
- [Testing email without spamming anyone](/en-au/learn/email/email-sandbox) — 4:40
- [What happens between send and the inbox](/en-au/learn/email/email-to-inbox) — 2:11
- [Why your sending domain is throttled](/en-au/learn/email/email-domain-throttled) — 3:24
- [Buying a dedicated IP](/en-au/learn/email/email-dedicated-ip) — 3:30
- [Email broadcasts: one email to your whole audience](/en-au/learn/email/email-broadcasts) — 8:08

## Resources

- [Documentation](/en-au/docs)
- [Learn more about Email](/en-au/products/email)