Update: Synchronize unsubscribes with your own database
Posted by David Greiner on June 22, 2005
A few customers have contacted us asking how they can access the email address of someone the minute they unsubscribe from a list. This is usually for customers who want to synchronize a local database with their Campaign Monitor subscriber list.
We're launching a big upgrade to our API in the coming days, but this is a great solution for those less familiar with web services.
This is now as easy as adding a single [email] tag to your unsubscribe confirmation URL (the address your subscribers get redirected to when unsubscribing from a form or an email).
For example, you could change your unsubscribe URL to:
www.mysite.com/goodbye.php?emailaddress=[email]
The email address of the individual who unsubscribes will then passed into the query string of that page. For example, the subscriber johnsmith@aol.com will now be redirected to:
http://www.mysite.com/goodbye.php?emailaddress=johnsmith@aol.com
This technique will work for anyone who unsubscribes via a campaign or an unsubscribe form.
4 comments so far
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Fergus Burns
wrote on June 30, 2005 4:40 AM
Do you intend to make your API available to external developers/partners, so they can extend your service offering
Dave Greiner
wrote on June 30, 2005 8:12 AM
We sure do. We're doing the final round of testing with a few super keen customers right now. The feedback's been fantastic so far, so if all goes to plan we should be releasing it in the next day or so.
We'll announce it here the moment it becomes available.
Gavin
wrote on August 3, 2005 11:58 AM
Sorry, bit of a newbie here - I have a project whereby I do need to synchronise with another DB. Is the intention of the above (non-API) method to then have some server-side code on the UnSubscribe confirmation page to then use the URL variable to perform the necessary action on the other database? Have I got that right? Thanks.
Dave Greiner
wrote on August 3, 2005 1:50 PM
Hey Gavin, yep that's exactly what it's intended for. Once it's in the querystring you can do whatever you want with it server side.
Got anything to add?