Most marketers have a love-hate relationship with preference centers: consumers will very rarely head to a preference center to add more emails to their inbox. Often, the only reason they go to preference centers is to unsubscribe – no marketers’ favorite button. 

Preference centers are necessary, though, and they don’t need to be a “necessary evil.” They can create a better customer experience, personalize experiences based on your customers’ interests, and ensure you remain compliant with data laws. In addition to these benefits, preference centers are an excellent source of zero-party data, which is becoming more critical as third-party data gets harder to come by due to the death of cookies and Apple’s iOS 15 privacy updates. But with the right strategies, any team can implement a winning preference center. 

The need for preference centers 

Preference centers are too often under-utilized. You shouldn’t only offer the most extreme option where subscribers must choose all or nothing for your communications. Opting-in and opting-out of different categories or lists can give consumers the option to receive less, but more relevant messages. In the end, this will benefit you both: quality over quantity matters when engaging consumers. You don’t want to send tens of emails to an uninterested subscriber who will never move forward with a purchase. Instead, you can share fewer, more personalized emails that are designed for the user’s specific interests, eventually encouraging them to make a purchase.  

Preference centers will also allow for more transparency with your subscribers because they can see what lists include them. This may lead to users opting into more emails because a specific topic interests them. It also helps you comply with data security measures such as GDPR.  

How to personalize preference centers  

Preference centers are great collectors of zero-party data, or data that consumers willingly and actively provide to you. If a consumer chooses to unsubscribe from all topics except a certain one, this information can be applied to more than just your email messaging. By connecting that preference to their overall profile in your CRM, you can integrate messaging around that topic throughout their customer journey, across multiple channels.  

This is why offering many list options through your email preference center can lower your unsubscribe rate and increase your conversion rate. If you’re a publisher, you could offer communications based on categories: a cooking newsletter, a hiking newsletter, a fashion newsletter. If you’re a technology provider, you could offer messages based on the channel: let them know about upcoming webinars, promotions, or future training courses. There's a multitude of options to categorize your preference center but best practice is to keep it to eight topics or fewer. 

How to gather more preference data beyond the preference center 

While preference centers offer a direct line of communication between you and your customer, it can be a challenge to get your customers to go in and identify their preferences. While there are plenty of strategies to increase profile preference penetration, such as making it a part of your profile set-up process, you’ll want more ways to gather data behind-the-scenes.  

Behavioral data collected throughout the customer journey can be a great way to accomplish this. Actions and touchpoints such as where they primarily browse on your website, what they’re clicking, what they engage with on your social media profiles, and what they’re buying should inform your team of the customer’s preferences. Let’s say you’re a culinary brand and a customer is always looking at the best-of-the-best pots and pans. It would be silly to send them a “Cooking for Dummies” newsletter – they’re probably more advanced and may be interested in a challenging recipe that calls for one of the pans instead. So while preference centers are instrumental to collecting zero-party data, they’re not the only route you should look to in order to personalize the customer journey. 

Create the best preference center 

With these strategies, you can create a functional and beneficial preference center – one that isn’t just for unsubscribing but instead works for both you and the consumer. Utilizing zero-party data, analyzing behavioral data, and creating a more streamlined, transparent, and relevant customer experience can get you closer to your KPI goals.  

To learn more about how to optimize your preference centers to collect zero-party data, get in touch with us today.