Who you can email

You can only send marketing email to customers who said yes to it. That's the law in many places, it's what Gmail and other mailbox providers expect, and on Iraca's shared sending address it protects every business's emails from landing in spam.

You'll find where each customer stands under Marketing → Consent.

Everyone starts at "not agreed"

When Customer Marketing was turned on for your business, every customer you already had started as Not agreed, whatever their history with you. Buying from you, having a portal login or agreeing to delivery texts isn't the same as asking for marketing email.

How a customer agrees

Only the customer can agree. Nobody on your team can mark them as agreed, one at a time or in bulk, not even if the customer said yes over the phone or at the counter. The customer agrees in one of these ways:

How	Shows as
Ticking Email me news and offers when they create an account on your customer portal	ticked the box when signing up on your portal
Ticking the same box when they check out on your portal	ticked the box at checkout
Pressing Yes, send me emails in a confirmation email you sent them	confirmed from your confirmation email
Signing up on your email sign-up form and pressing Yes, send me emails in the email it sends	signed up on your form
Subscribing from the link at the bottom of one of your emails	subscribed from their email preferences
Opting in on your Shopify store, when Shopify recorded it	opted in on your Shopify store
Ticking the marketing box the Iraca Connector plugin adds to your WooCommerce checkout	opted in on your WooCommerce store

Both boxes start unticked. A customer who leaves them alone stays as they were.

WooCommerce has no marketing-consent setting of its own, so Iraca only reads the Iraca Connector's box. A box from another newsletter plugin isn't read.

Your email sign-up form

If you sell meal prep with the Menus add-on, you have a public sign-up form for growing your list: people leave their name and email and tick a box that names your business. Find its link under Copy customer link on a meal-prep menu or cycle, and put it on your website or social profiles. The same form appears at the bottom of your public order-ahead menu.

Filling in the form doesn't sign anyone up. It sends them the same confirmation email you can send yourself, and they're only counted as agreed once they press Yes, send me emails in it. That's because anyone can type an address into a form: the email proves it's theirs.

Some things to know:

• Someone new is added to your customers as a retail customer, with the name they typed. A customer you already have keeps the name you have for them.
• A supplier's address, or a wholesale customer's, is never turned into a retail customer, and isn't sent anything.
• The usual rules for asking still apply: people who unsubscribed, are on your suppression list, reached you only through a marketplace, or were asked in the last 180 days aren't sent another email.
• The person always sees the same "check your email" message, whichever of these applies, so the form never tells a stranger who's already on your list.
• The form works once Marketing → Sender is ready to send (your reply-to address confirmed and your postal address filled in). Until then its page says sign-up isn't open.

Asking customers to confirm

For customers who haven't agreed, you can send a confirmation email. It asks one question, whether they'd like emails from your business, and has one button.

1. Go to Marketing → Consent.
2. Tick the customers you want to ask, or filter the list and press Ask everyone in this list.
3. Press Send.

Iraca writes the email, in the customer's language, and you can't change it. Afterwards a summary shows how many were sent and why any weren't.

A few things to know:

• Nothing changes until they press the button. A customer who ignores the email stays Not agreed. Opening the email doesn't count either.
• Once every six months. Each customer can be asked once every 180 days, with no reminders.
• It counts toward your sending limits. Confirmation emails count toward your daily limit and monthly allowance like any other marketing email (see How much you can send). If you reach the limit partway, the rest wait and you can send again the next day.
• Up to 100 at a time. Send again to continue with the rest.
• The link works for 30 days, once. After that, or once used, it does nothing.
• Bounces and complaints count. Sending to an old list that bounces or draws spam complaints can pause your marketing email (see If your marketing email is paused), so start with customers you've heard from recently.

Customers you can't ask

Some customers can't be sent a confirmation email at all. The list shows why:

• Known only from a marketplace. Amazon, Walmart, Etsy and TikTok Shop forbid sellers from marketing to their buyers, and Amazon's addresses only forward order messages. Iraca treats a customer as known only from a marketplace when every order they have came from one of those four, and they have no login on your portal. If that customer later creates an account on your portal and ticks the box, they've agreed through your portal and you can email them.
• Unsubscribed. Someone who left your list can only come back by subscribing themselves: from the link in one of your emails, or by ticking a box again. You can't send them a confirmation email.
• On a do-not-email list, or asked recently. See Addresses your emails won't go to.

On a customer's page

A customer's page shows their marketing email status, how they agreed and when. It's read-only. To ask them, use Marketing → Consent.

When a customer unsubscribes

A customer who unsubscribes, from the link in an email or with their mail app's Unsubscribe button, is marked Unsubscribed at once. See How customers unsubscribe.

Segments count only customers who agreed

A segment under Marketing → Segments only ever counts customers who agreed and are not suppressed, whatever its conditions say. It also shows how many of the customers it matched have not agreed yet. See Grouping customers with segments.