Managing Email Subscription Preferences

What Is Preference Management?

Preference Management is a feature that helps your business maintain email compliance by giving contacts control over the types of marketing communications they receive. It allows you to create custom subscription categories, link them to your email campaigns, and automatically honor opt-outs at the category level. This ensures that contacts only receive emails they have explicitly agreed to, reducing spam complaints and improving deliverability.

Key Benefits

Compliance and Control

Automatically uphold opt-out decisions for specific categories, ensuring every email send respects contact preferences.

Improved Deliverability

Reduce unwanted messages and spam reports, which helps protect your sender reputation over time.

Personalized Engagement

Send content that aligns with what contacts want to receive, making your communications more relevant and effective.

Location Customization

Each location can define its own subscription categories based on its unique marketing strategy and needs.

Understanding Preference Types

Preference Types are the categories you create to classify your email programs, such as newsletters, promotions, or event updates. You can create as many as needed to match your email themes. These categories are managed in the Preference Management Hub under Settings and can be edited, disabled, or deleted at any time.

Linking Preferences to Campaigns

Assigning a preference category to an email campaign tells the system the purpose of the send. This enables automatic audience filtering based on contact choices. If a contact opts out of a category, they are excluded from all current and future sends for that category, even if they are on a static list included in the campaign.

Automatic Audience Filtering

The system automatically excludes contacts from campaigns if they have opted out of the associated preference category. This happens even if the contact was originally part of the campaign audience, ensuring accurate targeting and preventing unwanted emails.

How to Set Up Preference Management

Step 1: Create Preference Types

Preference Types are the subscription categories you use to label your email programs.

1. Navigate to Settings → Preference Management Hub at the location level.
2. Click + Create Subscription Type.
3. Enter a Subscription Name and Description for the category. Use a clear, descriptive name up to 100 characters long.
4. Save your changes and confirm when prompted.
5. Repeat for each category you need.

Step 2: Assign Preferences to Campaigns

1. Open the email campaign you want to assign a subscription type to and click Send or Schedule.
2. Select your desired Preference Type from the dropdown menu.

Managing Preferences for Individual Contacts

You can view and adjust each contact’s preferences from their Contact Details page for full transparency and control.

1. Go to Contacts and select a contact.
2. From the contact page, open the DND tab and click Subscription Status.
3. In the Manage Email Subscriptions popup, set each Preference Type to Subscribed or Unsubscribed as appropriate.
4. For any category marked as Unsubscribed, you must provide a legal basis before the contact can be resubscribed.

Note: Preference changes made at the contact level are logged in Conversations for review.