Subscriber preference centres

With a subscriber preference centre, your email recipients can change their own subscription details. This could mean updating their name or email address, or any custom field information you have stored for them.

Benefits of a preference centre

A preference centre makes it easy for subscribers to modify how you interact with them, instead of opting to unsubscribe. There are multiple reasons someone may want to unsubscribe:

• They don't want email on a particular topic.
• They have a new email address.
• They'd prefer less frequent emails.
• They're not sure what emails they signed up for.

When subscribers can change their preferences — for example, the frequency of emails or the topics they're emailed about — it increases the chances of keeping them on your list. It's also a great way to reduce the number of email addresses 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, or otherwise.

Customise subscriber preference centres

The look and feel of the preference centre can be customised. Below is an image of a preference centre that uses a custom header image.

You can also format the background colour, write a custom welcome message, and change the display language, as shown in the image below.

It is possible to have different preference centres for different subscriber lists. Your page customisations — for example, the header image and welcome message — will be used across-the-board, but the fields displayed are unique to each list, as explained below.

Mobile number and SMS consent

If you have enabled SMS campaigns, you can display the Mobile number field and an SMS marketing consent checkbox on your form. See Collecting mobile numbers to grow your SMS subscribers.

Tracking permission and company policies

You can optionally show a subscriber's tracking permission settings on their preference centre. This way, if a subscriber changes their mind on their tracking preference, they can change the setting themselves.

You can also link to your privacy and cookie policies, if you have them. If you complete the policy fields, you will see text at the bottom of the preference centre in the following format:

See the [privacy policy text with URL] and the [cookie policy text with URL]

Set visible fields

You can set up a preference centre with nothing more than an email address field for subscribers to update, or you might have multiple custom fields you want people to see and edit, depending on the list.

To control which fields are displayed and which are not:

1. Click Lists & subscribers, then select the relevant subscriber list.
2. Click Custom fields in the left menu.
3. At the top of each page you can create new custom fields. Each field can be set to Visible or Hidden.
4. When you select Visible, an additional option will appear that allows you to select whether the field should be Required. Selecting this makes the field mandatory which means the subscriber will not be able to save their preferences until they have completed the field.