Email Preference Centers: A New Way of Thinking
- Author:
- Chris Marriott
- Source:
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Gentlemen might prefer blondes, but do you know what your email subscribers prefer? As we all know, making your emails more relevant to your audience enhances their likelihood of getting read and clicked on, in turn driving revenue. Marketers can get a read on what interests email subscribers through the use of a preference center, a single page that not only opts customers into an email stream, but also asks for specific interests. For example, a retailer might ask whether a new subscriber wants to hear about men's or women's apparel, electronics or appliances. In our experience, customers with preferences tend to respond to emails at 2.5 times the rate of other customers.
While sound in principle, marketers have often made repeated errors in the intent and usage of the preference center. These errors include:
- Asking for too much. Sometimes, marketers see the preference center as an opportunity to conduct market research, asking questions that have no bearing on what email the customer will receive. On no account should a marketer ask for any information that does not immediately relate to email content, as each incremental question reduces completion by 4-5 percent.
- Having more than one preference center. Organizations with multiple business units sometimes fail to unify preference centers. So, in the above example, a retailer might have one preference center for apparel, another for electronics and so on. Needless to say, this situation only causes confusion and a poor experience for the customer.
- Failing to deliver. Many marketers like the idea of allowing customers to elect different cadences for their email, say once per week, semi-monthly, or monthly. However, these marketers might only have the resources to issue emails at one of those cadences. Again, customer dissatisfaction will result from these circumstances.
To these traditional discussions around preference centers, I'd like to add one more: the role of analytics-driven preferences versus preference-center-driven preferences...
