Consent & guest preferences
Sidedoor handles marketing consent and unsubscribes for you, on every send. You don’t keep suppression lists, scrub bounces or check opt-ins by hand - the platform does it, and it errs on the side of not sending if anything is unclear. This page explains the model so you know what’s happening behind the scenes.
Who you can market to
Section titled “Who you can market to”Consent is tracked per operator and per channel (email, SMS, push). In practice, you can send marketing to guests who have done business with you - booked, visited, bought - unless they’ve opted out or been suppressed. A guest opting out of your messages has no effect on other operators: each venue group is treated separately.
Transactional messages are different. Booking confirmations, receipts and account emails aren’t marketing - they always send, regardless of marketing consent.
How guests opt out
Section titled “How guests opt out”Every marketing email carries the tools a guest needs to opt out, and they always work:
- A one-click unsubscribe for that channel (including the native “Unsubscribe” button many inboxes show).
- A link to a preference centre, where the guest can turn Email, SMS and push on or off individually for your venue and save. These pages carry Sidedoor’s own branding (not your venue’s logo, colours or font), but they name your venue in the copy so the guest knows exactly whose preferences they’re managing - and guests don’t need to log in.
Automatic suppression
Section titled “Automatic suppression”Some contacts are removed from future sends automatically, without anyone using an unsubscribe link:
- Hard bounces - email addresses that don’t exist or reject mail.
- Spam complaints - email addresses that mark a message as spam.
- SMS STOP replies - a guest who texts back STOP (or a similar keyword) to one of your SMS messages.
Each of these is single-channel and applies to that one contact detail: a hard bounce or spam complaint suppresses that email address for email, and an SMS STOP reply suppresses that phone number for SMS. Because a dead or complaining address is a problem for any sender, these suppressions apply platform-wide for that channel and contact - but they do not extend to the guest’s other channels or contacts, and there’s no single guest action that stops all marketing everywhere.
These, along with unsubscribes, are skipped on every future send. The campaign composer reminds you of this with a note that suppressed and unsubscribed guests are skipped automatically at send.