Subscribers Overview

Understanding Subscribers in Hail Mail

This article explains how subscribers work in Hail Mail, including subscriber statuses, management options, and best practices for maintaining healthy contact lists.

What are Subscribers?

Subscribers are the individual email contacts in your Hail Mail account. Each subscriber has an email address and optional details like name, and can be assigned to one or more mail lists. When you send content through Hail Mail, it goes to all subscribers on the lists you select.

Subscriber Information

Each subscriber record contains:

Email address (required): The contact's email - this is the only required field.

First and last name (optional): Helps personalise communications and makes your subscriber lists easier to manage.

Consent status: Records whether the contact gave permission to receive emails. This is essential for compliance with anti-spam regulations and is automatically set when subscribers opt in through signup forms or when you manually confirm consent.

List membership: Shows which mail lists the subscriber is on. Subscribers can belong to multiple lists.

Subscriber Statuses

Subscribers can have different statuses that affect whether they receive communications:

Subscribed

Active subscribers who are on one or more mail lists and will receive your communications. This is the standard status for contacts who have given consent and not opted out.

Unlisted

Email addresses that exist in your account but aren't assigned to any mail lists. These contacts won't receive any communications until you add them to a list. Unlisted contacts typically occur when you delete a mail list without removing its subscribers, or when you add a subscriber without selecting any lists.

You can find unlisted contacts by filtering the subscriber list by "Unlisted" status - from there, you can add them to appropriate lists or remove them from your account entirely.

Unsubscribed

Contacts who have opted out of receiving emails. This happens when someone clicks the unsubscribe link in your emails. (Sometimes by accident!) Unsubscribed contacts remain in your account for record-keeping but won't receive future communications - necessary for compliance with anti-spam regulations. You can add them back with their permission.

Bounced

Email addresses that failed to deliver. Hail Mail tracks two types:

Soft bounces: Temporary delivery failures like full inboxes or temporary server issues. Hail automatically retries delivery for soft bounces.

Hard bounces: Permanent failures from invalid or nonexistent email addresses. Hard-bounced contacts are automatically prevented from receiving future sends to protect your sender reputation.

Spam Complaint

Contacts who marked your email as spam. These subscribers are automatically prevented from receiving future communications. Keeping spam complaints low is essential for maintaining good email deliverability across all your sends.

Viewing and Managing Subscribers

Access your subscribers from the "Your Subscribers" tab in Hail Mail:

1. Search and filter: Use the search bar to find specific email addresses, or filter by status, mail list, or other criteria to view specific groups.
2. Bulk actions: Select multiple subscribers to perform actions like adding to lists, removing from lists, or deleting contacts entirely.
3. Individual actions: Click on any subscriber to view their full details, edit information, see their list memberships, or remove them from specific lists.

Export options: Download subscriber data for contacts with issues (bounced, unsubscribed, or spam complaints) from the dashboard, to review and clean your lists.

Subscriber Limits

Your Hail Mail plan includes a subscriber limit - the total number of unique email addresses you can have in your account across all lists. The Hail Mail dashboard shows your current usage and available slots.

Counting subscribers: Each unique email address counts once, regardless of how many lists they're on. Someone on five different lists still counts as one subscriber toward your limit.

Exceeding limits: If you reach your subscriber limit, you'll need to either remove contacts or upgrade your plan to add more subscribers.

Best Practices for Subscriber Management

Regularly review subscriber statuses: Check for bounced, unsubscribed, and unlisted contacts monthly. Remove hard bounces and consider reaching out to unlisted contacts to add them to appropriate lists or remove them entirely.

Respect unsubscribe requests: Never manually re-subscribe someone who has opted out unless they have requested this specially. If someone wants to re-subscribe, they could also do so through your public signup on content.

Keep lists clean: Remove obviously invalid email addresses and regularly audit your lists to ensure you're only sending to engaged, consenting contacts.

Verify consent: Only add subscribers who have explicitly given permission to receive emails from you. This isn't just good practice - it's legally required in many jurisdictions.