New feature: Let your subscribers manage their own email preferences

Published May 08, 2008 by Mathew Patterson

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!

16 Comments

Posted in: New Features & Updates

16 Comments

Tim Anderson-Bonsor
May 8, 2008 4:46pm

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
May 8, 2008 5:56pm

No firm timelines on MailBuild yet Tim, but we would expect it later in the year.
Julian Wellings
May 9, 2008 2:14am

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
May 9, 2008 11:11am

Great to hear Julian, thanks for your patience as we put it together.
Matt Crest
May 10, 2008 7:41am

This is great!
I’d love to have it available for my MailBuild clients as well. :)
Mark Wyner
May 11, 2008 11:21am

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

Thanks!
xtfer
May 21, 2008 2:30pm

This is a great feature, but can you add a way to exclude certain fields from the preference centre? We have one field we don’t want our users to see - its an id from another system - but using Preference Centre it shows up as an option for them to fill in…
Dave Greiner
May 21, 2008 9:20pm

Cheers for the suggestion xtfer, that’s something we’re aware of for certain lists, and if it continues to stop customers from using the feature we’ll consider adding a flag to custom fields so they can be hidden from the preference center.
Stefan Seiz
May 22, 2008 1:00am

We have the same problem as xtfer. We keep customer ids of our subscribers which we don’t want them to change. It would be goog if we could exclude certain fields from showing up in the “Preference Center”.
Ferenc Andahazy
May 22, 2008 1:34am

Excellent! I agree that this feature would be another big selling point for MailBuild as well. Thanks for a great new feature. Keep up the good work.
Carissa Phillips
May 24, 2008 3:43am

I’m casting my vote for this in MailBuild too!
Faith
September 24, 2008 9:42pm

Another vote for Mailbuild too please!
Mark123
November 17, 2008 1:04am

Another vote for mailbuild
Eric
December 11, 2008 1:32pm

A vote for custom field exclusions.
Alex Willcocks
December 12, 2008 1:58am

Custom field exclusion here too please, can’t start using it otherwise which is a shame as it’s a great feature!
Jules Morgan
December 13, 2008 12:43pm

yeah, custom field exclusion would really be helpful. I’m forced to only import partial databases in the meantime if I want to use it.

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