FunnelKit Automations gives you the flexibility to control the subscription statuses of your contacts.

As the contacts can enter in different ways, such as getting imported from CSV, submitting a form, etc., FunnelKit Automations gives you control over adding/modifying the contact status in both the opt-in and non-opt-in processes.

The contacts in FunnelKit Automations can have one of the following six statuses:

• Unverified
• Subscribed
• Bounced
• Unsubscribed
• Soft Bounce
• Complaint

In this documentation, you’ll learn about the subscription status of a contact in FunnelKit Automations.

Unverified Contacts

A contact will be put as ‘Unverified’ if they get added in FunnelKit Automations through a double-optin form but they haven’t clicked on the confirmation link yet.

You’ll not be able to send your promotional emails to unverified contacts until their subscription status changes to ‘Subscribed’.

Subscription status can be modified either by clicking on the confirmation link or manually changing the status in FunnelKit Automations.

Subscribed Contacts

A 'Subscribed' contact is a contact who has confirmed their subscription (in case of double opt-in settings) and has not unsubscribed or bounced.

In case the double-opt-in setting is turned off, the entered contacts will directly be marked as 'Subscribed'.

You can send any type of email (whether transactional or promotional) to your subscribed contacts.

Bounced Contacts

A contact is labeled the 'Bounced' when an email sent to them is not delivered due to their invalid email address. FunnelKit Automations integrates with various email service providers and automatically marks contact as Bounced. 

Please note that you need to set up bounce handling in FunnelKit Automations to automatically filter and handle your email bounces.

FunnelKit Automations handles bounces and removes these contacts from your list using custom rules that extract the recipient’s email address.

Unsubscribed Contacts

A contact gets labeled as 'Unsubscribed' in FunnelKit Automations if:

• They have manually unsubscribed by clicking on an unsubscribe link in an email campaign, OR
• You have manually removed them from a list or from unsubscribe action in an automation

Please note that you cannot send promotional emails to unsubscribed contacts (transactional emails can be sent).

Soft Bounce

A soft bounce occurs when an email is temporarily undeliverable due to issues like:

• Recipient's inbox is full
• Recipient's mail server is down
• Email size exceeds the limit

Unlike a hard bounce, which signals a permanent delivery failure, a soft bounce often indicates a transient issue that may resolve over time.

Email delivery systems usually treat soft bounces as recoverable, assuming the temporary issues may be resolved before subsequent emails are sent.

Certain email systems, like Amazon SES and other services, use a threshold for soft bounces.

If the same email address soft bounces multiple times (three consecutive emails), the contact may be reclassified as bounced.

Here's the filter hook to modify the soft bounce limit:

add_filter('bwfan_contact_soft_bounce_limit', function($limits) { return 5; });

Complaint

A complaint status means the contact has reported your email as spam. This can be serious as it can affect your email sender's reputation, leading to deliverability issues.

Complaints can occur if your emails are perceived as irrelevant or unwanted.

And that's it! This was all about the contact's status in FunnelKit Automations.