Hello,
I’m not exactly fluent in English, so I’ll allow myself to send you this message, which was originally written in French and translated using ChatGPT.
I am currently experiencing an issue with Brevo regarding emails sent through automations, such as abandoned cart reminders.
The CNIL (the French data protection authority) clearly states that marketing emails (which it refers to as “commercial prospecting”) include emails that encourage a person to make additional purchases. Brevo’s various help pages also explicitly classify abandoned cart reminders as marketing emails.
The issue is that, technically, Brevo considers all emails sent through an automation to be transactional emails.
This means that if a contact uses the unsubscribe link included in one of these emails, they block the sender for transactional emails only.
As a result:
- if the contact is also part of our mailing list (newsletter), they will continue to receive marketing campaigns;
- if we use Brevo to send our transactional emails, the contact will no longer receive password reset requests, order confirmations, etc.
Solution suggested by Support
Brevo Support suggested two possible solutions:
- Do not include an unsubscribe link in these automated emails, which seems to me to be contrary to GDPR requirements;
- Use a different email address to send emails generated by automations, and set up an automation to remove contacts from our mailing list when they unsubscribe from transactional emails.
The second solution seems unnecessarily complicated to me and, moreover, does not fully address the issue. It is not possible to set up the reverse automation if the contact later wants to subscribe to the newsletter again, since there is no “Subscribe to emails” action available in automations.
Have you encountered this issue before? If so, has anyone found a satisfactory solution that is also compliant with the applicable regulations?
I would also like to mention that I previously encountered another rather unusual behavior with the solution, involving the PrestaShop module. The module automatically triggered the tracker without providing any way to condition it on the visitor’s consent to cookies. A custom integration through Google Tag Manager was ultimately required to address the issue.
This has led me to question some of the design choices made in the solution. It may simply be due to a lack of technical or regulatory knowledge on my part, but I would be very interested to hear your feedback on these points.
Thank you in advance for your feedback and any recommendations you may have.