Consent, unsubscribes and deliverability

Governance is the part of marketing that decides whether any of the rest works. It covers five things.

Consent. Who has agreed to marketing, recorded per person on their record, with a log of when and how. Consent is not a checkbox somebody remembers ticking — if it is not recorded, you do not have it.

The preference centre. A page recipients reach from your emails where they choose what to hear about, rather than facing all-or-nothing. Offering "less often" or "only product news" keeps people you would otherwise lose entirely, and it is the single highest-return thing on this page.

Suppression. Addresses that must never be emailed: unsubscribes, hard bounces, complaints. It is applied to every send automatically, on top of whatever the audience says. That is why send counts are lower than audience counts, and it is working as intended.

Deliverability. Whether your mail reaches inboxes at all. Two things dominate: your sending domain being properly authenticated, and your own behaviour — sending to people who want it. Buying a list, or mailing an old one, damages a reputation that takes months to rebuild.

Retention. How long marketing data is kept, which is a legal question in most of Europe rather than a preference.

The rules that catch people out:

• An unsubscribe is immediate and permanent until that person opts back in themselves. You cannot re-add them because they are a good customer.
• A hard bounce is not a temporary problem. Repeatedly sending to dead addresses is one of the strongest spam signals there is.
• Consent does not transfer. Someone who agreed to hear from the company you acquired has not agreed to hear from you.
• "They are a customer" is not consent for marketing they did not ask for, though existing-customer rules do differ by country.

If someone reports still receiving mail after unsubscribing, check the consent log first — it usually shows a later re-subscribe, often through a form they filled in themselves. If it does not, treat it as urgent.

SMS has the same obligations, with STOP in place of an unsubscribe link: Consent and opting out