I continue to be amazed at the fact that large emailers (brands, retailers, etc..) will spend so much money and effort on their email marketing program but not be bothered to create a decent email preference center. Given that email continues to be one of the most important messaging channels brands have, you’d think this would be worth the relatively small investment of time and money.

I know I’m probably in the minority since I used to spend a lot of time actually building and customizing these types of pages, but the default, out-of-the-box solution provided by your email marketing platforms is just NOT a good look.

“But wait, those people are unsubscribing, so why not just let them leave? Why worry about them at that point?”

1. Because it’s your brand and reputation; you should provide a great experience no matter what the user is doing! And hey, maybe if you’re nice, unique or interesting enough, they’ll come back someday. On the flip side, if you treat them like “lowly, unsubscribing jerks” on their way off your list, then that’s one more reason they won’t ever come back.
2. Also, maybe they just want to reduce the amount of emails they get from you? This is what we call “opting down” and it’s more common than you think. Ask yourself this…how many brands do you buy something from and truly want to get an email from every single day? Not that many, right? Ok, so maybe give them another option somewhere between “EMAIL IN YOUR INBOX EVERY SINGLE DAY” and “NO SOUP (email) FOR YOU!”

Mmmm, “email soup.” That’s a fun term.

Ok, so if you’re liking where this “tough love” approach is going, then read on for some friendlier suggestions to provide a better email preference center experience:

1. First off, just have an actual email preference center (not only an optout page); it’s amazing to me how many larger brands just let people opt out without even trying to save them.
2. Take the time to brand the page and make it a bit different than the cookie-cutter option provided by your ESP. It does not need a ton of extra flair, but just slapping a logo on a page without any other changes is pretty lame.
3. Allow ways for your subscribers to “opt down” to a lesser frequency (e.g. “want to hear from us weekly instead of daily?”).
4. Incentivize users to stay subscribed in some way, but don’t make it a pain to opt out (I have seen any manner of tricks for obfuscating the opt out option; these attempts to make it harder to unsubscribe don’t actually stop people from unsubscribing but they do piss them off)
5. If you’re offering options to reduce frequency or make changes, it sort of goes without saying that those changes need to actually work and take affect in your mailings (I tried opting down for mailings from Section119.com — which uses Klaviyo — but they just never worked and I have had to unsubscribe entirely…sad!)
6. Nice-to-have: Include a confirmation message tailored to the user’s response; if they opt down, you can thank them for staying on the list in some way (note that this probably requires some conditional logic and scripting, but most ESPs should have options for this)
7. Nice-to-have: speaking of tailoring the messages to the user, if someone is opting out, the confirmation page might be a place to offer them an incentive to stick around?

There are a couple other options to consider, but I don’t think these are quite as straight-forward in terms of the direct benefits:

a) Including a survey to capture their reasons for opting out

This type of optout form became super common as it is the default Mailchimp optout page/format. I think this can be useful for some brands if they actually do anything with the info they gather (other than ignore it, which is what most senders do)

b) Sending users back to your website

Some ESPs offer the option to automatically send users back to the brand homepage after x number of seconds. I think this is better than doing nothing, but I’d probably prefer the option of showing them a way to opt back in or to make additional changes rather than sending them back to the website (that is, unless you’ve got some sophisticated way of re-engaging those users on the site)

Technical Stuff

Now, for smaller brands and newsletters that are on low-cost email services, there are cases where having a full-blown preference center may not really be an option or make sense.

But, for everyone else, you really don’t have an excuse. If your ESP does not allow for some decent customizations to your optout page in order to make it a preference center, then it’s probably time to fine a new provider!

If you’ve got similar experiences, pet peeves or better suggestions, please add your thoughts.

Otherwise, happy preference centering!

p.s. I am officially open to consulting work in this space, so if you’d like some assistance with optout or preferences pages (including design, coding, implementation, etc…), please reach out to me: greyandgreendigital <at> gmail