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New feature: Let your subscribers manage their own email preferences

Posted by Mathew Patterson on May 8, 2008

Have you ever had one of your subscribers change their email address, and ask you to update it for them? In the past, they either had to get you to do it, or unsubscribe themselves and resubscribe.

Or have you had subscribers who are happy to hear about your toy store's new soft toy range, but are not at all interested in your BMX bikes? You don't want them to have to unsubscribe totally, right?

That's why we've launched a new feature for all Campaign Monitor users today, which we call the Subscriber Preference Center. The idea is to give your subscribers more fine grained control over the information you store about them, including their name, email address, and custom field values.

By adding a simple tag to your HTML and plain text, you can create a link to a preference page pre-filled with the subscribers existing details. They can change their details, add or remove subscriptions or unsubscribe completely, all without contacting you.

Here's an example we've created, just for demonstration purposes. Imagine that Twitter offered a variety of different newsletters - their preference center could look like this:

Giving your subscribers this kind of control doesn't only mean less work for you; it can reduce the amount of subscribers who completely unsubscribe, by letting them opt out of just a part of your emails. They might also feel more confident knowing they can check exactly what they are subscribed to at any time.

To find out how you can setup these kind of 'interest' sub-lists for your clients, check out the full Preference Center help.

How to get started with a Subscriber Preference Center

It's easy - all you need to include a link in your campaigns to the preference center is a simple tag:

<preferences>this will be a link</preferences>

and

[preferences] for plain text

That's it. You can also jump into your 'Manage Clients' section and on each client's page you'll see the "Preference Center customization" link. That's where you can change the background color, text colors and add a logo.

There's plenty you can do to make good use of preference centers, and for more ideas and details check out the help topic. Thanks to everyone who has requested this feature, we hope you find it helpful!

6 comments so far

Tim Anderson-Bonsor

wrote on May 8, 2008 3:46 PM

This is fantastic, thanks so much for introducing this, although I'll add the default response to any big CM announcements - when's this coming to MailBuild?

Keep up the amazing work.

Mathew Patterson

wrote on May 8, 2008 4:55 PM

No firm timelines on MailBuild yet Tim, but we would expect it later in the year.

Julian Wellings

wrote on May 9, 2008 1:13 AM

Fantastic news! You said it was coming soon and here it is.
I evaluated CM some months ago and thought it was just I needed for my clients with one exception - the manage preferences facility.
Now it's here I can start migrating some customers across to you and using you for new clients.

Dave Greiner

wrote on May 9, 2008 10:11 AM

Great to hear Julian, thanks for your patience as we put it together.

Matt Crest

wrote on May 10, 2008 6:41 AM

This is great!
I'd love to have it available for my MailBuild clients as well. :)

Mark Wyner

wrote on May 11, 2008 10:21 AM

This is a top feature. Definitely on top of my most desired.

Thanks!

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