How to Build a Winning Email Preference Center?

A surge in the number of newsletter or email unsubscribes is a nightmare for any business. Has this been a cause of distress for you too?

Marketers struggle a lot to get opt-ins and then engage prospects. However, not sending the right content to those prospects can lead to unsubscribes, which means losing potential revenue.

So, how can this situation be made better?

The best option is to provide your subscribers with a choice to manage their content/category preferences. An Email Preference Center helps you exactly with this. It allows your subscribers to filter the kind of content that they want to receive, making it more personalized, targeted, and valuable for the subscriber. This translates into establishing a better relationship with your potential customers.

But many organizations and marketers narrow down the idea of EPCs to just “reducing the number of unsubscribes”. If you have been believing this too, you may want to take a fresh look at how to build an efficient EPC that not only reduces unsubscribes but also offers your customers a plethora of preferences.

By incorporating some key elements, you will be able to build an EPC for yourself that will help you segment your audience based on their interests. With that, you will have a better understanding of their choices and can then incorporate them in your marketing strategy.

Elements required for building a productive EPC:

1. Planning: Crafting a strategy to effectively implement your EPC should be your biggest priority. Your EPC should help you retain subscribers, expand your reach, and build brand loyalty.

2. Content: If a prospect has subscribed to receive emails from your company, then it is clear that they were impressed with at least one of your services or products and may want to know more about them. Let your content do the talking and let it help you establish a strong relationship with the prospect through your EPC.

3. UI/UX: Leverage your design skills while building your EPC and differentiate it from the cluster of insipid EPCs that most companies usually end up with. This will definitely help you draw more attention from the users. Also, simplified user experience is key for any tool to be impactful. Just like your website, your EPC should also deliver a seamless user experience.

4. Segmentation: Access to a variety of business intelligence software has helped marketers analyze their customer database better. These software let marketers segment their audience and manage the content that is being sent to customers. An EPC, also, gives you the ability to segment your audience and manage content to be sent to them. Once you do that, you can invest your time and effort in planning your approach to make prospects into customers, and ultimately, an advocate for your brand.

5. GDPR: Since EU has now become extremely stringent with GDPR, compliance is non-negotiable. Ensure that you have an option in your EPC for the customer to explicitly “Opt-In” to receive your communication.

6. Operations: An EPC adds substantially to your time and effort and helps you justify your marketing budget. If your EPC is constructed efficiently, your workload will be eased via automation and integration.

How we built our Email Preference Centre

Before building our EPC, we had an unsubscribe rate of 80%. However, once we realized what the problem was, it didn’t take us long to find the solution, which was to create an EPC in which a user has several choices to select the subjects that they are most interested in. When a user clicks on the unsubscribe button, they are taken to our Email Preference Centre where they can choose their interests and submit them to us. Going forward, only relevant content is sent to them and our marketing team nurtures them accordingly.

Here’s a look at our EPC and how it has helped us in decreasing the unsubscribe count.

How to make the best use of an Email Preference Centre

Let your customers develop clarity about their preferences. They may be vague about their choices but will definitely not want to read every email you send their way. Try to get more details from them as to what sort of content they are genuinely interested in.

Give your customers the autonomy of selecting the kind of emails that they want to receive and how frequently they want to receive them. Focus on building a relationship with your customers through your emails. Sending them the right content while being authentic to the tone of your brand is a great way to do that. Your subscribers must feel that you care about their time and that their interactions with you would prove to be fruitful.

Curious about how all this would come together to create the best Email Preference Center?