Managing the subscription status of your contacts is essential for effective communication and customer relations. It involves handling their preferences for receiving your marketing and transactional communications. By respecting individual choices and staying compliant with regulations, you can build stronger relationships with your audience and achieve greater success.

Good to know

• To learn more about blocklisted contacts and the reasons why they can get blocklisted, check our dedicated article What are the different types of blocklisted contacts?.

• In Brevo, you have the option to re-subscribe a blocklisted contact from their contact details page, but it is important to note that doing so would be considered illegal if the contact has explicitly requested to be blocklisted to stop receiving your communications.

What are the different subscription statuses?

Contacts may have different subscription statuses depending on the communication channel. For example, they may be subscribed to your email campaigns but blocklisted from your SMS campaigns.

Here are the two subscription statuses available in Brevo:

• ✅ Subscribed
  The contact has explicitly consented to receive your communications. You can contact them through the channel they are subscribed to.
• ❌ Blocklisted
  The contact has been blocklisted from receiving your communications. You cannot contact them through the channel they are blocklisted from.

Blocklist, unblock, or re-subscribe a contact from their details page

To manage the subscription status of your contacts:

1. Go to Contacts.
2. Select a contact to open their details page.
3. Go to Channels. To learn more about managing the subscription status of your contacts for each communication channel, expand the corresponding accordion below:
   💬 Email, SMS & WhatsApp campaigns

   Under the Channels section, click the Email, SMS, or WhatsApp campaigns dropdown:

   • Select Subscribed to subscribe the contact to all your email, SMS, or WhatsApp campaigns, respectively.
   • Select Blocklisted to blocklist the contact from your email, SMS, or WhatsApp campaigns, respectively.

   

   🖥️ Web push

   When a web push contact has been identified, you can view that they are subscribed to your web push campaigns from the Channels section. However, you cannot blocklist them yourself.

   

   ✉️ Transactional emails

   Under the Channels section, click the Transactional emails dropdown:

   • Select Approve all senders to approve the sending of transactional emails to the contact (from any of your senders).
   • Select Block all senders to block the sending of transactional emails to the contact (from any of your senders).
   • Toggle the button next to a specific sender to:
     • Approve the sending of transactional emails to the contact from this specific sender, or
     • Block the sending of transactional emails to the contact from this specific sender.

   

   📱 Transactional SMS

   Under the Channels section, click the Transactional SMS dropdown:

   • Select Approved to approve the sending of transactional SMS to the contact.
   • Select Blocked to block the sending of transactional SMS to the contact.

   

You can only unblock or re-subscribe contacts from their details page. You cannot unblock or re-subscribe multiple contacts at once.

Manually blocklist multiple contacts

To manually blocklist several contacts from your email campaigns:

1. Go to Contacts.
2. Select the contacts you want to blocklist:
   
   
   1. To select multiple individual contacts, select the checkboxes next to the contacts.
   2. To select all of the contacts on your current page, select the checkbox at the top left of the table.
   3. To select all of the contacts on your current list or database, select the checkbox at the top left of the table and click Select all contacts.
      
3. Click Blocklist.
   
   
4. Enter the number of selected contacts to confirm.
5. Click Blocklist.
   

⏭️ What's next?

• View your blocklisted contacts (unsubscriptions, complaints, hard bounces)

🤔 Have a question?

If you have a question, feel free to contact our support team by creating a ticket from your account. If you don't have an account yet, you can contact us here.

If you’re looking for help with a project using Brevo, we can match you with the right certified Brevo expert partner.