Sending consent request emails

How to send a consent request message

Zoltan Wagner avatar
Written by Zoltan Wagner
Updated over a week ago

Consent request emails are dedicated email messages to collect express consent from contacts in order to prevent expiry of consent.

How this request is communicated is critical to get the most people to confirm their subscription.

Content tips

Keep it brief - no more than 4-5 sentences - and avoid legal terms. Don't include anything else in the email except your message and a Subscribe Me button. Social media icons etc create distraction. You want this to be a very focused message.

Describe benefits: Position your request for consent as a benefit to your contacts. For example, instead of saying "We must have your consent to remain CASL compliant" you could say: "Please confirm your permissions to continue receiving emails about workshops, classes and special offers".

Subject line: Describe benefits in the subject line as well and use the preheader text to expand on this. Instead of saying "Please confirm your subscription" or "We miss you!", you could use:

Subject line: We miss you from the company name community

Preheader text: Get inspiring stories, events and research news from us


Frequency of messages should be communicated. People don't want to receive a flood of emails from anyone and not knowing what to expect they might assume that by subscribing they'll get a ton of emails so they don't subscribe. You should say somewhere near the subscribe button that "We send no more than one email per week" or whatever the actual volume is.

Follow these steps to create and send a consent request email:

Sending the consent request message

Step 1 

Create a segment to select contacts who haven't provided express consent. See the example below. You can read more about working with segments here.

Unsubscribed and spam reported contacts are automatically filtered - there is no need to manually remove them from this (or any other) segment.

Step 2

Create a new email message. 

Include a link or button in the message and link this to the email preferences page using this special field:

{@pref-1}

Here's an example:

Step 3

Send a test message to confirm functionality.

Step 4

Send the emails to the segment created in Step 1.

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