Two lists, one system
There are two different things on screen and they are easy to confuse. Subscription types are what a client signs up for — there are seven, and you switch them on or off for your whole site under Settings. Preference categories are what a client switches off — there are five, and they appear on the contact record, in the client portal, and on the preference page linked from every email you send.
Every type answers to one category. That is deliberate: it keeps an unsubscribe meaningful. Someone who turns off listing alerts means “stop telling me about properties”, so price drops and nearby sales stop too, rather than continuing to arrive from a switch they never found.
The seven subscription types
- New listings in an area — new listings matching a search the client saved.
- Market updates for an area — periodic sales figures for an area they follow.
- Newsletter — your own newsletter, sent when you publish one.
- New articles from your blog — a roundup of new articles.
- Open house dates — upcoming open houses, on one property or across the board.
- Price drops — a property they saved has come down in price.
- Sales and new listings nearby — sold and newly listed homes near a property or area they follow.
The five preference categories
- Listing alerts — covers new listings in an area, price drops, and sales and new listings nearby.
- Market updates — covers market updates for an area.
- Newsletters — covers your newsletter and the blog article roundup.
- Home value updates — covers home value reporting.
- Open houses and events — covers open house dates.
Where a category covers more than one type, the screen says so underneath the switch, so nobody turns something off without knowing what goes quiet.
Turning a type off for your site
Under Settings, switching a subscription type off removes its sign-up buttons from your site and stops it sending. Anyone already subscribed keeps their record, so turning it back on picks up where it left off — you are not deleting an audience by pausing a feature.
Where a sign-up actually goes
Two of the types hand off to the systems that already do the work rather than sending on their own. A market updates sign-up subscribes the person to the published market report for that place. A new listings in an area sign-up creates a real client alert on their contact record, which the agent can then narrow with price, beds or property type.
The sign-up buttons you place on your site ask for a location, and that location is always chosen from cities and areas that actually have listings — never typed freehand — so a sign-up cannot point at a place that does not exist.
Signing up for a report you have not written yet
Someone can ask for market updates in a city before a report for it exists. The sign-up is real from that moment and simply has nothing to send yet. Publish a report for that city and everyone waiting on it is subscribed automatically — there is no step to remember.
Market Reports shows how many people are waiting on each place, which is the clearest signal available for which report to write next.
What an opt-out never touches
Transactional email is not a marketing category and cannot be switched off here. Milestone notices to someone under contract are relationship email, and they keep sending regardless of marketing preferences.
