In this tutorial Shaun Whynacht demonstrates how to implement a "soft unsubscribe" in GoHighLevel, allowing contacts to opt out of a specific email sequence without being removed from the entire system. He walks through creating a custom landing page that thanks the contact for their decision, then generates a trigger link in GoHighLevel that points to that page. The trigger link’s unique key is copied into the email footer (instead of a regular URL) so that when a contact clicks it, a secondary automation fires. Shaun shows how to build the initial email workflow that includes the soft‑unsubscribe footer, and then how to create a second workflow that is triggered by the link click. Within this opt‑out workflow he configures Do Not Disturb (DND) settings (email‑only or all channels), adds a tag to mark the contact as opted‑out, and optionally sends a notification to the user. He also adds a conditional branch that checks the contact type (lead vs. customer) so that different actions can be taken for each group, such as notifying only for customers or re‑opting‑in leads. Finally, Shaun notes that trigger links can be repurposed for any link‑click automation, not just unsubscribes, and invites viewers to ask questions in the comments.
Chapters
In this video, I want to walk you through a process called a soft unsubscribe. So this is going to be where somebody can remove themselves from your mailing list or sequence without actually using the unsubscribe button on the bottom, which will actually take them out of the entire system. Now, this is going to give you the control to either give them that full, hey, you know, let's unsubscribe from everything, or just the specific series they're in. So you can use this in different places. So what we first have to do is figure out the reverse of the process. What do I mean by that? I mean, where are they going to go when they click the link in the email to unsubscribe? In this scenario, I'm going to show you one that I've set up for myself in the business where they can actually unsubscribe from the entire emailing without actually showing up as an unsubscribe or giving that signal back to your email server. So here's the page that I created. Sorry to see you go, but I understand you want to see other people in your inbox. So I created this on my website and we're just going to copy that link to my clipboard. Now I'm going to come back over to my GoHighLevel account and I'm going to go into the marketing section here and I'm going to look for something called trigger links. Now what a trigger link is, essentially a link that you can embed on any link, whether it's an image or text in an email and have it go to a set destination, in this case, that page that I just showed you. But the magic part of this is when they click the link, we can fire a secondary automation to run. And that's what we're going to do. So I'm going to go here. I'm going to go add link and I'm going to give it a name. So the name that you're just going to see it in the list and you'll be able to know what it is. So I'm going to call this opt out of email. And then paste in the destination they'll go to when they click that link and we're going to click Save, and then it's going to show up here. Now this link key here is going to be what we're going to need to put into the automation, uh, moving forward. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into, let's say, an automated sequence. I'm going to open another tab so I have that there to go with, and we're going to create a workflow here. So this can be done either in an email broadcast or in a workflow. So Let's say you're doing an email nurture. So we're going to go here and create a workflow. We'll start from scratch and we're going to call this opt-out test. So we're not going to run any triggers for this. We're actually just going to go in here and put in the email. We're going to say send email and we'll say it's going to come from me, put in my email address. And this could be just in any email. So let's just say this is welcome email. Now you go ahead and you put in all your copy there. Hi, and we'll merge in the first name. This is an email about a lot of cool stuff, right? Whatever the email is, doesn't really matter. But what you're going to do is in the footer of the email, you could do something like, um, don't want to receive these emails anymore. No problem. Click, click here. Here. And we will remove you. All right, so let me just move the little timer here out of the way. So no problem. Click here and we'll remove you. So you can either highlight the whole thing just like that, but here's the key is when you go ahead and put in the link, To this, instead of putting in the URL, what you're going to do is you're going to put in this link key. So we're going to copy that to the clipboard and we're going to paste that in there just like that. And it's going to open in a new window. So it's going to put that link on that email. Okay. So now we're going to go ahead and we're just going to click save and that email's there. Now that footer can be copy and pasted onto any email in the entire sequence that that you're doing. You can put it in every email that you have going along the way. So we're just going to publish that for a second. And now what we're going to do is we're going to come back and we're going to make another workflow that is for when they go ahead and opt out. So I'm going to throw in this admin folder in here and I'm going to say create workflow, start from scratch. And we're going to always name it. So let's say, um, opted out of email. Now, what we're going to do here is we're going to say that this is based off of a trigger link click. And we're going to click the filter and we're going to say which trigger link. And in this case, it's only that one. That's why that naming comes important. And now whenever they click that link, this is going to fire. So now what we're going to do is we're going to do the good old DND. We're going to enable that. And here's, you can choose, you can use all channels or specific emails. So if it was, you only want to opt them out of the email, you can go ahead and click email and then it'll still allow you to text, but it's just email, but you could do the entire correspondence. So, you know, you can do one or the other, or in this case it could be, um, you know, all of them. All right. So it's going to do that. Now, another step is you could also do a tag. Right? So just to keep track of them, just opted out within the system. And if you want to go ahead and have it so you're notified, you can do that. You can send yourself a notification in here as one of the steps. You can text yourself that, hey, this person opted out. Um, all that, those different stages that are there. Now, one of the things is if you've got your CRM set up where there's different leads and then your clients, you could do an if statement here. So you could go here and say if— so this is going to be client. So if contact type— let's find the type here— contact type is customer, right? We can do customer instead of client. Add another branch, call this lead. If contact type— type is lead, right? So you got lead customer. Now what this allows you to do is you could go ahead and say, okay, I'm going to copy all the actions from this. I'm going to paste it in here. So those things will happen on both. But if you want to treat your customers differently where you're only notified if customers opt out, then you have the control here to have that experience different than just the lead. Maybe you don't need to know if your leads are opting out, but your customers may be important because you're sending them emails for invoices or coaching or whatever it is that you're doing. And you still want to be able to correspond to them. In that case, if they opt out, you could reach back to them and then just say, hey, you know what? I'm going to opt you back in so I can email you, but I'm going to remove you from this list that you're on within the system. So, um, be aware of that type of functionality. So it gives you a lot to do with these trigger links, and these can be used for anything other than just opting out. Maybe you're sending them to your website or to a specific, uh, sales page and want to have follow-up automations that happen if they click on it and go there. Use the trigger links. Those are going to be very powerful. In setting up your automation. So if you have any questions about what I showed you here, please leave a comment in the video below and I'd be happy to respond to that. Or if you have any other questions about other types of automation, go ahead and put that in the comments as well. And as always, like, subscribe to the channel. 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