Losing a subscriber over one email shouldn't cost you the whole relationship.
Previously, when a member unsubscribed, they'd be gone from every email sent afterward; the update they wanted, the announcement they'd have opened, all of it.
Most of the time they didn't want out entirely. They wanted out of one kind of email.
Email Topics lets members opt out of the specific kind of email they're not interested in instead of unsubscribing from everything. A member who's already paying doesn't need another promotional discount, but they still want to know when new content drops.
Now they can turn off Promotions and keep Content Announcements, instead of losing both.
How It Works
Every email you send, whether it's a one-off broadcast or a step in an automation, gets tagged with a topic.
Members choose which topics they want to hear from. If they opt out of a topic, they stop getting those emails and keep getting everything else.
Default Topics
Every store starts with three topics:
News
Promotions
Content Announcements
You can rename any of them to match how you actually talk to your audience; "Promotions" becomes "Deals," "News" becomes "Updates," whatever fits.
You can also add up to seven more custom topics, for ten total, so you can be as specific as you want: a topic for a particular program, a members-only tier, a live event series, anything worth separating out.
ℹ️ INFO: Transactional emails, receipts, password resets, and billing notices are never affected. Members always get those, and there's no opt-out for them.
Setting It Up
Manage your topics from Settings > Marketing Email Settings > Email Topics.
That's where you create new topics, rename the defaults, and archive ones you no longer use.
When you build an Email Broadcast or an Automation, you'll pick a topic for it from a dropdown right there in the send flow.
💡 TIP: It's the only extra step. Tag it once, and Email Topics handles the rest.
What Members See
Members manage their subscriptions from a dedicated Email preferences tab on their profile, no more digging to the bottom of a settings page to find it.
They can also get there straight from the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any email, which now leads to a page listing every topic they can manage, not just a blanket opt-out.
They can still unsubscribe from everything if that's what they want. But once opting out of one topic doesn't mean losing all of them, fewer members reach for the full unsubscribe in the first place.
📝 NOTE: If a member unsubscribes from everything, that's permanent. Even if you add a new topic later, they stay unsubscribed from it too. They'd need to manually opt back in.
🔗 Learn more about Email Preferences
FAQs
Can members still unsubscribe from everything, not just one topic?
Can members still unsubscribe from everything, not just one topic?
Yes. The Email Preferences page includes an option to opt out of all marketing emails, not just individual topics.
Will members see a topic's new name if I rename it?
Will members see a topic's new name if I rename it?
Yes. The preferences page always reflects the current name you've set for each topic.
If a member already unsubscribed from everything, will they get emails from a topic I add later?
If a member already unsubscribed from everything, will they get emails from a topic I add later?
No. A full opt-out is permanent, including for topics added afterward. They'd need to manually opt back in.
What happens to a member's topic opt-out if I archive that topic?
What happens to a member's topic opt-out if I archive that topic?
Archived topics disappear from the member's email preferences page, since they can no longer be assigned to new broadcasts or automations. The member's original opt-out record isn't lost; it simply no longer applies to anything active. If you unarchive the topic later, it reappears in preferences and picks back up where it left off, so there's no need to recreate a topic from scratch just to pause and resume it.