Adding a Preference Center or Unsubscribe link to your campaign

Adding a Preference Center or Unsubscribe link to your campaign

Improve communications with your contacts by giving them an easy way to manage how you contact them and what data you hold about them.

The preference center allows contacts to:
  1. Change their details
  2. Change their marketing preferences
  3. Change the lists that they belong to, meaning they can unsubscribe from specific lists instead of unsubscribing from all of them — opt down instead of opt out.
After you've set up the preference center, contacts select a link in one of your email campaigns to access it.

Use the preference  center

When a contact wants to make changes in the preference center they must select the link in your campaign, edit their preferences, and then select Save your preferences .

In the preference center, contacts see any contact data fields, preferences, and lists that you set as public in your account. Anything set as private is not visible.

If the contact wants to unsubscribe from all marketing email, they can select Unsubscribe from all email in the preference center.

Set up the preference center

  1. Set all contact data fields, preferences, and lists that you want to show in the preference center to public. By default, contact data fields and lists are private.
  2. Insert a link to the preference centre in your email campaigns. There are two ways to do this.
    1. Send contacts to the preference center when they select Unsubscribe.
    2. Insert a separate preference center link in your email campaigns.

Set contact data fields, preferences, and lists as public

Contacts can edit their details, preferences, and the lists they belong to by changing the values in their contact data fields and by selecting and de-selecting preferences and lists.

To show contact data fields, preferences, and lists in the preference center, you need to set their visibility to public.
Make sure names are user friendly
After you set contact data fields, preferences, or lists to public, your contacts can see them when they access the preference centre. Make sure that you use names your contacts can understand.

Set contact data fields to public

  1. Expand the User menu and go to Settings > Contacts > Contact data fields .
  2. Select the Properties icon of the contact data field that you want to set to public.
    Contact data fields are spread across two tabs: Default data fields stores the contact's personal details, and Custom data fields stores all fields created by you or your team.
  3. Expand the Access drop-down menu and select Public .
  4. Select SAVE.

Set preferences to public

  1. Expand the User menu and go to Settings > Contacts > Marketing preferences .
  2. Select the preference name that you want to set to public.
  3. Expand the Access drop-down menu and select Public .
  4. Select SAVE.

Set lists to public

  1. Go to Audience > Lists .
  2. Select the Properties icon of the list that you want to set to public.
  3. For Visibility under the Settings tab, select Public (show in preference center).
  4. Select SAVE .

Send contacts to the preference center with Unsubscribe

To send contacts to the preference center when they select Unsubscribe in an email campaign:

For new accounts, contacts are sent to the preference center by default when they select Unsubscribe.
  1. Expand the User menu and go to Settings > General > Account settings .
  2. Under the heading Unsubscribe and preference center settings , expand the When a contact clicks 'unsubscribe' drop-down menu and select Show the preference center chosen below .
  3. To display the default preference center, expand the When a contact wants to change their marketing preferences drop-down menu and select Show the default preference center .
    If you have a custom preference center, then select one of the other appropriate choices.
  4. Select SAVE SETTINGS . 
You can include both Unsubscribe and preference center links in your email campaigns, where the Unsubscribe link removes the contact from all lists and the Preference center link allows them to edit their preferences.

To allow both Unsubscribe and Preference center links in your campaign:
  1. Expand the User menu and go to Settings > General > Account settings .
  2. Under the heading Unsubscribe and preference center settings , expand the When a contact clicks unsubscribe drop-down menu and select Show the unsubscribe page .

  3. Select SAVE SETTINGS .
This enables the Preference center link option in the email EasyEditor, in addition to the Unsubscribe link option.

Learn how in Add a preference center link to your campaign.
If you send contacts to the preference center when they select Unsubscribe, you can't also insert a separate link to the preference center.

Preference center translations

The default preference center is available in 20 different languages. We display to each of your contacts a preference center that has been translated into the language that their browser is set to (if that language is available).

Read more in Display the Unsubscribe or Preferences page in your contact's language.

Customize the preference center

You can use the Surveys, pages, and forms tool and its Marketing preferences element. This lets you effectively create a preference centre that you can customise by adding your own images for branding and using your own copy.

Preference centers built with Surveys, pages, and forms

When building your own custom preference canter using the Surveys, pages, and forms tool, it's important to note that:
  1. It's not possible to include lists in a survey, page or form (even those set to Public) as you can with the default preference center or a signup form. 
    Use this type of preference center if you are happy to only display marketing preferences or contact data fields to your contacts to edit, rather than lists.
  2. You can use an automated program to sort contacts into specific lists based on their responses to a preference center built with Surveys, pages, and forms.
  3. The form needs to either be embedded on a page of your website, or you can use the URL of the form itself as the custom preference center.
  4. To ensure the Preference center link in your email campaigns displays your custom form:
    1. Expand the User menu and go to Settings > General > Account settings .
    2. Under the heading Unsubscribe and preference center settings, expand the When a contact wants to change their marketing preferences drop-down menu and select either Show a custom preference center on a page or Show a custom preference center on a URL .
  5. It's not possible to include an unsubscribe option in a custom preference center that uses Surveys, pages, and forms form blocks, so you need to include a separate unsubscribe link in your campaigns if you use this type of custom preference center.
  6. If you want to use a custom process for unsubscribing contacts, check out Create an unsubscribe option on your page or contact your Customer Success representative to discuss how we can help you with this.


    • Related Articles

    • Adding an unsubscribe link to your campaign

      All of our templates include an unsubscribe link, but you may find you need to add an unsubscribe link elsewhere into your campaign. You can insert a link into your campaign that when clicked on will start an email from the contact to a specified ...

    • Adding tracking to campaign links

      Summary You can automatically add tracking code to your campaigns' link URLs. For example, if you want to track where your traffic comes from, and your website has that capability, then you can automatically have our system add a query string to ...

    • Adding links into your campaigns

      The option to add links (hyperlinks) appears on the ribbon whenever you are working on text or images. We've included some standard links in drag-and-drop editor which we know you'll find useful including the unsubscribe link, which must be included ...

    • Adding links to documents

      If your account level allows it, you can upload documents and other files to your account which can be linked to from one or more email campaigns. The option to add links appears on the ribbon whenever you are working on text or images. When adding ...

    • Using Link Grouping to Group Campaign Links Together

      Summary You can use link grouping to group various links from your campaigns together. This benefits your link click reporting and link click segmentation. If you use external dynamic content blocks in your campaigns and they contain links, then link ...