Build and manage the preference centers

Having well-built email and SMS preference centers for your subscribers comes with a number of benefits:

1. Retaining more subscribers by giving them more nuanced preference options rather than forcing an all-or-nothing experience.
2. Retaining more engaged and satisfied subscribers by allowing them to personalize their marketing experience with your content and business.
3. Obtaining more data around your customer’s desires and interests to help guide future products, sales, etc.

Sender reputation is built on having a more engaged than unengaged subscriber reaction with your content. By allowing subscribers to limit what content they do and don’t receive, you are actually letting them help you maintain a list of engaged and interested subscribers to keep your sender reputation strong.

A way to give subscribers control over the content they receive is by creating audiences based on the types of content you wish to send. For example, you could create audiences based on content type and expected frequency:

• Monthly newsletter
• Weekly promotions
• Daily sale alerts
• New product releases.



The more power you give the subscriber the more focused your marketing campaigns can become, which is beneficial all the way around.

Add an audience to the email or SMS preference center

Subscription preferences are tied to audiences. People can unsubscribe from all email and SMS communications, or just specific audiences, via the email and SMS preference centers.

It’s a good idea to build in detail your preference centers to make them informative and easy for your audiences to use.

The preference centers will only show a person the audiences that:

• are public, and
• the person viewing the preference center is a member.

You can make an audience public (enabled) or private (disabled) in the audience’s view (SMS) or from the email preference center settings (email).

This means that if you have 6 public audiences, a person who is a member of 3 of them will only ever see the 3 relevant audiences in their preference center.

Email preference center

To add an audience to your email preference center:

1. Navigate to Settings > Email > Preference center.
2. Click the Audiences tab.
3. Click Add subscription audience.
4. Select an audience.
5. Once the audience has been added, click its name to expand the display text options.
6. Click Save & exit to finish.

Learn more about the email preference center.

You can also access this page from the audience's view, under Preference centers. If you click the edit icon, you will be taken to the email preference center settings.

SMS preference center

To add an audience to your SMS preference center:

1. On the Audiences page, click on the name of the audience you wish to configure.
2. In the left-hand panel of the audience’s view, under Preference centers, click the edit icon.
3. Select the checkbox to enable the audience for the SMS preference center.
4. Type a public name and description for the audience.
5. Click Save when you are done.

You can also view and edit the content of the SMS preference center via Settings > SMS > Preference center.

Subscription preferences in email and SMS messages

Email message footers will display different subscription management options depending on how you configure the email audience.

Sending an email message to a private audience will give audience members the following options in the email footer:

• Unsubscribe — by clicking this link the person will be unsubscribed from all email.
• Update your preferences — clicking this link will take the person to the email preference center where they can update their email preferences.

Sending an email message to a public audience will give audience members the following options in the email footer:

• Unsubscribe from this list — by clicking this link the person will be unsubscribed from the specific audience the email campaign was sent to.
• Update your preferences — clicking this link will take the person to the email preference center where they can update their email preferences.

Learn more about email unsubscribe links under Unsubscribe links in the footer in Creating an email campaign.

All SMS campaigns include an opt-out link which is not dependent on whether the audience is public or private. The opt-out link takes the person to the SMS preference center. SMS opt-out content can be edited under Settings > SMS > Consent opt out and default responses.