A Preference Center allows each of your recipients to easily change their own subscription details. This might include their name and email address, and even custom field information you have stored for them.
To customize the preference center for a client (one setting for all of their lists), jump into their ‘Client settings‘ tab and click ‘Preference Center‘ in the bottom of the right hand column.
Benefits of using a Preference Center
When someone is thinking about unsubscribing from your list, they could actually be thinking about a variety of different things. For example…
- I wish they wouldn’t send me email on this topic
- I would like to change my email address
- I wish they’d send these emails less often
- What am I actually signed-up for?
A preference center makes it easy for any of your subscribers to modify how you interact with them without the need for completely unsubscribing from your list. It’s also a great way to reduce email churn (the number of emails in your list that become inactive). On average, 15-25% of all valid email addresses are discarded each year as people move to a different ISP, change jobs, etc.
A Preference Center means these subscribers can update their email address and ensure they continue to hear from you.
Adding a Preference Center link to your campaign content
Linking to your preference center is as easy as adding the following tags to your email content. When we send your campaign, we’ll convert this into a personalized link for each of your subscribers.
HTML emails – <preferences>this will be a link</preferences>
Plain text emails – [preferences]
Managing advanced preferences such as topics of interest
By setting up custom fields and segments within your subscriber list based on the types of emails you send, you can easily allow your subscribers to change any kind of preference you desire.
For example, let’s say you send emails on the following topics:
- Surfing
- Snowboarding
- Skateboarding
First off, we create the custom fields to store these preferences. Head into your subscriber list and create a custom field called “I’m interested in” and define the different options (surfing, snowboarding and skateboarding). Here’s a screenshot of how this looks:
You may have custom fields which are used for storing internal IDs or codes, or other information you don’t want your subscribers to see or edit. It’s simple to set those fields to not appear in the preference center view.
You’ll also see indicated in the screenshot the check box that controls whether the field will show up on the preference center or not. Save your changes, and it’s instantly updated for you.
Now that your custom fields are created, you simply create a segment for each preference so you can easily send targeted emails just to those subscribers with that preference.
Now, whenever you send a campaign to this list (or a segment of this list) and include a Preference Center link, your recipients will be able to select which topics they’d like to receive emails about, change their details, but not see anything you don’t want them to edit.