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Email Marketing - Subscriber lists and Categories.

The Email Marketing module has two core components that work together when sending campaigns: Subscriber Lists and Categories. Understanding how each one works — and how they interact — is key to ensuring your emails reach the right contacts.

Looking for a full module overview? See Understanding the Email Marketing Module for a complete guide covering campaigns, statistics capture, sender health, and more.

Subscriber Lists

Subscriber Lists are managed by admins in the Subscribers tab of the Email Marketing module. They define pools of email addresses that can be selected as recipients when sending a campaign.

  • Admins can create, edit, and assign contacts to lists
  • A contact can appear on multiple lists included in a single campaign send — Freedom will not send duplicate emails; each contact receives only one copy regardless of how many lists they appear on
  • After a campaign is sent, a corresponding opt-out Subscriber List is automatically created and can be found in the Subscribers tab > Lists subtab

Categories

Categories act as permission rules — they determine whether a contact on a Subscriber List is eligible to receive a campaign. Every campaign must be assigned a category at send time.

  • If a contact is opted in to the assigned category, they are eligible to receive the campaign (assuming they are also on the selected list)
  • If a contact is opted out of the category, they will not receive the campaign — even if their email address is on the selected Subscriber List
  • The category assigned to a campaign also determines which category the [[unsubscribe_url]] link will remove the recipient from
Important: Do not select an opt-out list as the distribution list for a new campaign. These lists contain contacts who have already unsubscribed and the campaign will not be delivered to them.

Frontend vs. Admin Interface

Category opt-in and opt-out is managed differently depending on who is making the change:

  • End users (frontend): Contacts manage their own category subscriptions via the Manage Subscription URL. They can opt in or out of any available category at any time.
  • Admins (backend): Staff cannot override a contact's category opt-in or opt-out status on their behalf. This restriction is in place to ensure compliance with email subscription policies.

Why contacts may not receive emails

A contact being present on a Subscriber List does not guarantee they will receive a campaign. There are three common reasons a contact may be excluded:

  1. They are opted out of the campaign's category. Even if they are on the list, contacts who have opted out of the assigned category will be filtered out before sending.
  2. Their email provider has blocked or filtered the message. External mail providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) may mark the email as spam or block it based on sender reputation.
  3. They are opted into the category but not on the Subscriber List being used. Both conditions must be true for a contact to receive the campaign.

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