Email Subscribers and Mailing List Management
Overview
The Subscribers tab shows every email address that has opted in to receive email from your organisation, and lets you unsubscribe someone on their behalf when they ask you directly instead of clicking the link in one of your emails.
At its simplest, the Subscribers tab answers one question: Who has agreed to hear from my organisation, and how do I honour a "please stop emailing me" request?
Who uses this: Organisation administrators with the OrganisationMail permission (from the organisation's Mail section) or EventMail permission (from an event's Mail section).
Key capabilities:
- See every subscriber your organisation has, across both opt-in categories (Marketing and Survey)
- Search by email address or name
- Filter by category or show people who have already unsubscribed
- Unsubscribe someone on their behalf, with a full audit trail of who did it and when
- Resubscribe someone who has changed their mind
- Open the full attendee overview for any subscriber who has bought tickets from you (if you have Balances permission)
- See at a glance whether a subscriber has any orders with you
Think of it this way:
- The Mailshots tab is about sending — composing and reviewing campaigns.
- The Subscribers tab is about your audience — who they are and managing their consent.
- A subscriber is someone who has said yes at least once. An unsubscriber is someone who was a subscriber and then said no.
How It Works
At a glance: Open the Mail section, switch to the Subscribers tab, find the person who asked to be removed, and unsubscribe them. The change is logged against your admin account and they stop receiving emails from you immediately.
1. Open the Subscribers tab
From your organisation's admin dashboard, open Mail, then click the Subscribers tab at the top. The tab shows the current count in brackets (for example, "Subscribers (428)"). You can also reach this from any event's Mail section — subscribers belong to the organisation, so you see the same list either way.
2. Find the person
Use the search box for email address or name. Use the Category dropdown to narrow by Marketing or Survey. Flip the Show unsubscribed switch if you want to see people who have already opted out — useful if you need to confirm a previous request was actioned, or resubscribe someone who has changed their mind.
3. Unsubscribe or resubscribe
- To unsubscribe someone, click the bin icon next to their row. You'll be asked to confirm. Once you do, they stop receiving that category of email from your organisation.
- To resubscribe someone, tick Show unsubscribed, find them, and click the refresh icon in their row.
Note: Subscribers belong to the organisation, not to a specific event. If you open the Subscribers tab from an event's Mail section, you'll see a yellow banner reminding you of this. Unsubscribing someone here stops them receiving email about every event your organisation runs — not just the one you happened to be looking at. This is deliberate: if a customer asks to be removed from your mailing list, that's almost always what they mean.
Who Counts as a Subscriber?
Someone becomes a subscriber when they tick a consent box. Seaty tracks two independent opt-in categories:
| Category | How someone joins | What they receive |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing | They tick "Allow marketing" during checkout, or sign up via a mailing-list form on your organisation page | New season announcements, promotions |
| Survey | They tick "Allow surveys" during checkout | Feedback and satisfaction requests |
Why two categories? Someone might be happy to receive feedback surveys from you but not promotional emails. Seaty respects each consent independently, so you can honour someone's "no marketing please, but surveys are fine" preference exactly.
Note: Transactional emails about orders someone has already placed (booking confirmations, performance-time changes, etc.) are separate — they're sent because the customer has a live order with you, not because they've opted in. They aren't managed from this tab. A customer can block these too by clicking "unsubscribe from all emails" in the footer of any Seaty email, but that's rare and customer-initiated only.
Unsubscribing Someone on Their Behalf
When to do it
Do this when a customer contacts you directly (by email, phone, or in person) and asks to be removed from your mailing list. Until this feature existed, you'd have had to forward them the unsubscribe link from one of your mailshots. Now you can action it immediately.
What happens when you click unsubscribe
- The subscriber's record is marked as blocked for that category, with today's date.
- Your admin account is recorded as the person who actioned it (this is the audit trail — if the subscriber ever disputes it, you have a record).
- If they have any past orders with your organisation, the matching consent flag on those orders is also cleared. This stops them getting picked up by future mailshots that pull recipients from order consents.
- They will not receive emails in that category from your organisation from that point on.
Why clear the consent on their orders too? Because Seaty builds mailshot recipient lists from both sources — the subscriber list and "everyone who ticked Allow Marketing at checkout". Clearing both means the unsubscribe actually sticks. If you only cleared the subscriber record, the next mailshot might pick them up again from their order history.
What does not happen
- Their order history is not deleted. Unsubscribing only changes their email consent — their tickets, payments, and customer record remain exactly as they were.
- They are not removed from the system. This is not a GDPR "right to be forgotten" action. If a customer asks for full erasure, contact Seaty support.
- They can still place new orders and, if they choose, tick the marketing box again — which would resubscribe them.
Resubscribing Someone
If a customer contacts you to say they do want to hear from you again, tick Show unsubscribed, find them, and click the refresh icon. Their consent is restored and the block timestamp is cleared.
Note: Only do this if the customer has actually asked. Resubscribing someone without their explicit consent would breach UK GDPR and PECR rules, and could damage your sender reputation.
Reading the Table
Each row shows:
- Action icons —
- Document icon: open the full attendee overview (same dashboard the Balances page opens). Only shown if the subscriber has orders with you and you have Balances permission. Lets you see their orders, payments, refunds, balance and more, and take actions from there.
- Bin icon: unsubscribe them from this category.
- Refresh icon: only shown on unsubscribed rows — click to resubscribe them.
- Email and name — name shown underneath the email where known.
- Category — which email category this row is for (Marketing or Survey).
- Subscribed — when they first opted in.
- Orders — a green tick if they have any orders with your organisation, a grey cross if not. Hover for the exact count.
- Status — "Subscribed" (in green), or "Unsubscribed" with the date, who actioned it, and the reason.
Why does the same email sometimes appear more than once? Because consent is tracked per category. A person who opted in to both Marketing and Survey will appear as two rows — one for each — and you can manage them independently.
Common Questions
Day-to-day use
A customer emailed us asking to be removed. Can I just do it myself now? Yes. Open Mail, Subscribers tab, search for their email, click the bin icon. That's it — you don't need to reply asking them to click a link, and you don't need to contact Seaty support.
Does unsubscribing them delete their order? No. Only their email consent is changed. Every order they've placed remains exactly as it was.
They ticked the box at checkout but never signed up on our organisation page. Will I still find them? Yes. Anyone who ticked Allow Marketing or Allow Survey during a Seaty checkout for any of your events is a subscriber.
The search finds nothing when I type their name. Search matches the email address and the name on the subscriber record. If they checked out as a guest without providing a name, search by their email instead.
What subscribers see
Do they get told I unsubscribed them? No — no confirmation email is sent. From their point of view, they simply stop receiving messages from you. If they want to verify the change, they can check their preferences in their Seaty account.
Can they resubscribe themselves later? Yes. They can re-tick the consent box at checkout on a future order, sign up again via your organisation's mailing-list form, or manage preferences in their Seaty account.
Scope and audit
If I unsubscribe someone from the Mail tab on a specific event, does it only apply to that event? No. Subscribers are always managed at the organisation level, even if you reach the tab from an event's Mail section. A yellow banner warns you of this. Unsubscribing someone stops them hearing about every event your organisation runs.
Who can see that I did the unsubscribe? The audit trail (admin name, date, reason) is stored against the subscriber record and visible to anyone with permission to see the Subscribers tab. It's not shown to the subscriber.
What if the customer later disputes it and says they never asked? That's exactly what the audit trail is for — Seaty holds a timestamped record of which admin actioned the change, and it's visible to anyone with Mail permission for the organisation.
Data and compliance
Does Seaty store the original opt-in consent? Yes. The Date Subscribed column shows when the consent was given. For order-based opt-ins, this is the order date; for mailing-list form opt-ins, it's when the form was submitted.
What about the "right to be forgotten" under GDPR? Unsubscribing stops future emails but doesn't erase the person from the system. For full erasure requests, contact Seaty support — that's a separate process that covers order records too.
What about booking confirmation and other transactional emails? They're not managed from this tab. Those go out because a customer has a live order with you, not because they've opted in to a list. A customer can still block them by clicking "unsubscribe from all emails" in the footer of any Seaty email — that's customer-initiated only and rare in practice.
Related Features
- Mail — Compose and send emails to your subscribers
- Event Mail — Send email to attendees of a specific event
- Managing Members — Separate from subscribers; members are people with formal organisation memberships