The power of the preference centre

Lurking at the base of every email sits the potential end to your email relationship with your contact – it is all so black and white – with one click “unsubscribe” it’s all over.  But it doesn’t have to be like this…..

Email preference centres improve the unsubscribe process and provide you with a number of opportunities that a simple unsubscribe cannot.

People who click unsubscribe don’t necessarily want to end their relationship with your business – it is likely there is another motivation for the unsubscribe; with email frequency being most common. By giving you prospects the opportunity to opt-down rather than opt-out you can keep the relationship alive. Preference centres allow the contact to be in control – to self-select elements like frequency, content, even contact method.

By creating multi-level permissions, not only for the channel i.e. email or SMS, but also according to topic or subject matter you are giving your contacts the opportunity to choose for themselves what they want to hear about.  Ensuring their engagement and goodwill from the outset.

Whilst this sounds like an administrative nightmare, it doesn’t need to be.  Indeed it will be better for everyone the easier you can make it. We all know this is content marketing best practice, but from May 2018 with GDPR, it will be a legal imperative as well. By understanding how your customers and prospects engage with you, you can be empowered to create valuable content that they appreciate and that ultimately leads to sales.

It is quality not quantity that you need from your contact database, and supported by automation you can nurture your prospects, convert to customers and maximise their lifetime value through on-going engagement around the aspects that they have told you they are interested in. Win-Win! Better results and less wasted effort – and whilst it may take a little thought to define your ideal customer personas – once you have this in place attracting more of the same is the name of the game.

Keep it simple

Make sure that it is as easy as possible for your customers to see what they are opting in to – the more confusing it is, the less likely your “top of funnel” prospects will spend the time defining what they need – because they are new to you and not invested yet – so if it isn’t simple then they are more likely to give up. Ultimately losing you the opportunity to ‘bring them round’

Make the options clear and concise and reflect you communications plan whether you have daily updates, specific topic insights, monthly newsletters or ad hoc promotions – state that clearly in the option.

Build trust and reassure your prospects by letting them know exactly what to expect and only provide options that you can deliver on. i.e. Don’t give options to choose frequency of mails if it is not something you can implement, or offer a frequency that doesn’t fit with your communications plan.

With e-shot™ you have all the tools you need to enable your customers to self-segment.  By using the preference centre functionality, your prospects can engage with your brand and confirm exactly what they are looking for from you. You can set up specific contact groups based on their interests and create automated series or dynamic HTML campaigns to keep them informed without you needing to implement every aspect of the campaign.

And, best of all, by using our granular reporting you can really get an understanding of your contact’s habits and triggers and build effective campaigns based on insights rather than educated guessing.

Commit to quality over quantity and doing less, better and your results and ROI will speak for themselves.