Programmatic Updates to the Subscription Center

Update Simon's Subscription Center via S3 Files

You can programmatically update the membership of individual contacts to lists in Simon's Subscription Center by sharing files containing email addresses to add / remove from the given list.

S3 Integration

Updating the Subscription Center programmatically depends on our S3 integration with your organization. You write files into a Simon-owned S3 bucket specific to your organization. If you need to set this integration up, please reach out to your account manager.

Adds and Removes

Daily, we pick up new files in the subcription_center_updates/unsubscribe/ folder of your Simon-owned S3 bucket and add all contacts in those files to their corresponding lists. Likewise, we scan thesubscription_center_updates/resubscribe/ path and remove contacts in those files from their corresponding lists.

Specifying List Names

We determine what list to update for each file by evaluating the prefix of the filename. We match the list name in the name of the file to the list name in the Subscription Center like this:

Target Subscription ListFilename Prefix
"Opt out of all communication"global_suppressions
"Spam Complaints"spam
"Bounces"bounces
User-created lists e.g. ("Marketing" or "Monthly Car Highlights")Your user-created list name normalized to snake_case (e.g. marketing or monthly_car_highlights). For questions about how to do this normalization, reach out to the support team.

Your file name should be structured with the filename as the prefix, followed by a dash - . If you're trying to update the "Opt out of all communication" list, for example, your filename should start with global_suppressions- but can be followed with whatever else you'd like. This is to allow you to upload multiple files for the same list at the same time. So you could upload multiple files with names like:

  • global_suppressions-group_1
  • global_suppressions-group_2
  • global_suppressions-another_group
  • etc.

This file naming convention is identical for both the unsubscribe and resubscribe operations. The operation performed is determined by the folder within which you put the files.

Update Process

By default, Simon will read these files daily from the S3 bucket and apply them to the subscription center. If you need them to be processed more quickly, speak to your account team.

Once the process successfully picks up your files and applies them to the subscription center, the files in your S3 bucket will be removed. We will store a copy of them internally to Simon in case they're needed, but will delete them from our shared bucket for clarity about what changes have been applied.

Duplicate records will not have an effect -- the most recent value will be applied to the subscription center.

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Requires configuration by the account team

After following these steps, please reach out to your account team to turn on this functionality.