8. Unsubscribes & the law

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Contents

1. The short version
2. What NX handles for you
3. What happens when a guest clicks Unsubscribe
4. Bounces and spam complaints
5. The Unsubscribes log
6. Unsubscribing someone yourself
7. Resubscribing — the one dangerous button
8. Your obligations, in plain English
9. Consent — where your addresses may come from
10. A monthly ten-minute hygiene routine

The short version

Marketing email is regulated. In the US that's CAN-SPAM; Canada has CASL, Europe has GDPR, and most other jurisdictions have something similar. The rules that matter to a restaurant are simple:

1. Every marketing email needs a working way to opt out.
2. Every marketing email needs your real postal address.
3. Don't mislead about who it's from or what it's about.
4. When someone opts out, stop — promptly, and permanently.

NX does 1, 2 (usually) and most of 4 automatically. Your part is honest content, honest consent, and not fighting the suppression system.

What NX handles for you

Every campaign email goes out with:

• A compliance footer — "Sent by Your Restaurant" (or "via NX"), your venue's postal address, and an Unsubscribe link. Added automatically unless you placed {{unsubscribeUrl}} in your own design, in which case yours is used instead.
• A one-click unsubscribe header — this is what produces the native Unsubscribe button at the top of the message in Gmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo and Outlook. Most people who opt out use that button, not your footer link. It works.
• Automatic suppression — anyone who opts out, hard-bounces or reports spam is removed from every future send. You cannot accidentally email them again.
• An audit trail — every opt-out is logged with who, when, why and from which campaign.

One gap to close yourself: the postal address in the footer comes from the venue's business address. An Enterprise-level campaign has no single venue, so that line is omitted. If you send Enterprise-level campaigns, put your postal address into the footer of the design (§4).

Also worth knowing: the automatic footer only appears on campaign and Quick Send email. Purely transactional messages (order receipts, login codes) are a different system and are not marketing email under these rules.

What happens when a guest clicks Unsubscribe

The link is personal to that recipient and that campaign, and it never expires — a guest who finds a six-month-old email and clicks it still gets removed.

If the recipient came from your Contacts:

• If they were on one or more of the lists that campaign targeted, they're removed from those lists only. They can still receive campaigns to other lists. Their contact record stays Subscribed.
• If they weren't on any of those lists — or the campaign had no lists at all — they're suppressed globally: no further email from your account, ever, unless you deliberately resubscribe them.

If the recipient came from your POS customers:

• Always global. Their customer record's email opt-out is set, and Marketing will never email them again.

Either way the guest sees a confirmation page showing which address was removed, and clicking again is harmless. The campaign's Unsubscribed count goes up by one.

Why per-list rather than always global? So a guest can leave your weekly-specials list without losing their catering enquiries or their loyalty mail. It's better for the guest and better for you. But it means a per-list opt-out doesn't stop everything — if a guest tells you "stop emailing me", use the global option in §6 below rather than assuming the link did it.

Bounces and spam complaints

These are handled without you doing anything:

Both hard bounces and complaints appear in the Unsubscribes log with the reason recorded, and on the campaign's Recipient Activity list (§5).

Never chase a complaint. Someone who marked you as spam and then receives another email from you is the single worst outcome for your sending reputation. Let the suppression stand.

The Unsubscribes log

Marketing → Unsubscribes (visible with your Enterprise selected; it covers every location).

Every column filters, so "show me every spam complaint" or "everything that happened this week" is a couple of clicks.

This is your proof. If a guest ever claims you kept emailing them after they opted out, this log is the record of when they opted out and what NX did about it. Don't treat it as a to-do list — treat it as evidence, and as a health check:

• A cluster of Spam complaint rows after one campaign → that campaign's content or frequency was wrong. Change something before the next one.
• A run of Bounce rows → list quality. Usually old hand-typed addresses.
• Lots of Admin action → your team is suppressing people manually, which is fine, but check they're not doing it instead of using Delete for genuine mistakes (or vice versa).

Unsubscribing someone yourself

When a guest asks you directly — in person, by phone, or by replying to a campaign:

For a contact: Contacts → find them → Unsubscribe → confirm. They're suppressed globally and a log row is written with reason Admin action.

For a POS customer: set the email opt-out on their record in the Customers area of the portal. Marketing can't do it for you.

If they might be both (a hand-typed contact and an online-ordering guest with the same address), do both. See §2 — this is the one case where NX's two pools can let a "stop emailing me" request slip through.

Do this promptly. The legal standard in the US is ten business days; the practical standard is before your next send.

Resubscribing — the one dangerous button

Resubscribe clears both the unsubscribe flag and the bounce flag on a contact, putting them back in your sending pool.

Use it only when:

• ✅ The guest asked to be re-added, and you can point to when
• ✅ They signed up again in person or online
• ✅ You suppressed the wrong person by mistake

Never use it to:

• ❌ "Give them one more chance"
• ❌ Rebuild a list that shrank
• ❌ Reach someone you really want to talk to

Emailing someone who opted out is the one action in this module that can result in a fine, and it's the behavior spam filters punish hardest. There is no Resubscribe for POS customers at all — that opt-out is managed on the customer record.

Your obligations, in plain English

These are the practical rules. This isn't legal advice; if you operate in Canada or the EU, or run a large multi-state group, get proper advice.

Do

• Send only to people with a plausible relationship to your restaurant — they dined with you, ordered online, joined your loyalty program, or gave you their address.
• Keep the subject line honest about what's inside.
• Make it obvious who the email is from (§7 — this is also what improves delivery).
• Include your real postal address. NX does this for venue campaigns; add it yourself on Enterprise campaigns.
• Honour opt-outs promptly, and in both pools if the person exists in both.
• Keep the Unsubscribes log intact — don't delete campaigns purely to tidy up, since their history goes with them.

Don't

• Buy, rent, scrape or swap email lists.
• Use a fake or unmonitored From name/address to look like something you aren't.
• Bury or complicate the opt-out, or require a login to use it.
• Re-add someone who opted out.
• Send marketing to an address given for a single purpose only (a job applicant, a supplier) without asking first.

Consent — where your addresses may come from

A quick sanity check on the sources a restaurant typically has:

When you're unsure, the safest move is a single email that says who you are, how you got their address, and asks them to confirm they want to hear from you — then market only to the ones who do.

A monthly ten-minute hygiene routine

Do this on the first of the month and you'll never have a deliverability problem:

1. Contacts → filter Status = Bounced. Confirm they're suppressed. Delete any that were obvious typos (gmial.com) and re-add corrected if you know the right address.
2. Unsubscribes → sort by When. Scan the last month. Any spam complaints? Which campaign?
3. Campaigns → last month's sends. Bounce rate under 2%? Unsubscribe rate under 0.5%? Click rate trending the right way?
4. Check your send frequency. More than four campaigns to the same audience in a month is where unsubscribes climb for most restaurants.
5. Once a year: identify guests who haven't opened anything in twelve months, send one "still want to hear from us?" email, and stop mailing the ones who don't respond.

Next: §9 Playbooks — ten campaigns worth running