Custom Email Preference Centre – What is it?

An Email Preference Centre is a place where your known prospects can subscribe (or unsubscribe) to the types of communications they receive from you. The intention of having this is to allow your prospects to choose which communications they are interested in reading about.

This should help reduce unsubscribes seen in your account and hopefully allow you to see higher engagement in your email statistics. Account Engagement (FKA Pardot) does come with an out of the box email preference centre that you can adapt according to your current marketing topics and you can read more about that in our blog here. However, in this blog, I want to talk about Custom Email Preference Centres. 

Now, you might be wondering, what is a Custom Email Preference Centre? How does it work? And what is the benefit in having this over the out of the box feature? Continue reading to find out more…

What is a Custom Email Preference Centre?

Depending on your marketing communication strategy, a Custom Email Preference Centre is a way to collect preferences before they are qualified prospects in Account Engagement. This allows you to begin tailoring communications from the very beginning. 

On the other hand, a default preference centre can only collect email preferences in Account Engagement when a prospect is known to you (and has been cookied). Therefore, you are unable to leverage this for unknown prospects and prospects are unable to change their personal details.

Zoe Fisher

Principal Marketing Automation Consultant

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How does it work?

A Custom Email Preference Centre leverages a form using custom fields instead of using public lists (you can choose to create a landing page with this option too). The key benefit here is that a prospect can opt in and out as they please, and have the ability to reset the form if they were to change email addresses. Then the automation in Account Engagement does the rest. 

With this, there are a couple of requirements:

1. Decide which preferences you would like to have – discuss this with your marketing team and other relevant stakeholders.
2. A responsive layout template – this will contain all your styling and various JavaScript (if required) for your preferences.
3. Decide if the fields should be created and mapped in Salesforce or created in Account Engagement only. Note, if you want to report on these fields, we recommend mapping this across to Salesforce.
4. A sign-up strategy – think about how you are going to drive traffic to your new preference centre. What notifications are needed to track engagement and responses?

Use the default or create a custom preference center?

Depending on your marketing communication strategy, a default preference centre may be all you need. But if you want a clear idea of your audience’s preferences, a custom preference centre is worth considering. Not only will it help you give your customers more control over their preferences, but you can leverage reporting if you decide to map these fields into Salesforce to spot trends over time. 

If you would like help developing either custom or default preference centre, speak to us to discuss your requirements.