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Design Considerations
Keep these design considerations in mind when you create a custom preference center.
What Is a Preference Center?
A preference center is a centralized contact management tool:
- Customers can manage the messages that they receive from a brand and the channels where they receive them.
- Customers can manage their accounts with brands.
- Marketers can tailor their contact strategy, including frequency and content, based on customer feedback.
Why Customize a Preference Center?
- The relationship that a company has with its customers evolves.
- Customer contact preferences shift as business and personal routines do, and as customer communication habits change.
- By setting expectations and offering improved controls, businesses can solidify a relationship of trust and increase customer retention.
- A well-designed preference center reduces guesswork and improves efficiency and responses. It centralizes governance and can serve as a source of truth when a growing team of marketers is sending customer communications.
When Is a Preference Center Most Important?
- At signup
- At opt-out, with the opportunity to opt down
- For account changes
- For life changes and milestones that require updates such as a new job or name change
- When adding types of messages
- When adding new channels
- For selecting frequency
- When adding a brand, org, team, country, or region
- To delegate sending capabilities
- To expand to multiple-language communications
Common Data Considerations
- When hosting the preference center, evaluate your current setup and consider these
hosting options.
- SFMC: Migrates to a centralized location with a feedback loop to CRM and other databases
- EHI: Site information goes to SFMC via API or MC Connect
- Lacek: Externally hosts
- Other options: For example, Salesforce Experience Cloud
- Determine how to fit the new preference data into the current data model with as
little disruption as possible.
- What system is the source of truth for preferences?
- What integrations are necessary to support the data model?
- Determine the hierarchy of data filters and apply it consistently. For example, Global do-not-contact > Channel-specific opt-out > preference filters > additional and behavioral segmentation.
- How do options differ for members and non-members?
- Which entry points do customers use to access the preference center? Is the experience
the same from all entry points, or do certain paths have broader or narrower access?
- Web profile login
- Channel: email (footer, body), phone (sales rep), mobile (web, app)
- How does authentication work?
- Is login required? Can the user authenticate with an email address, or do they need a profile?
- What are the data privacy concerns? What national or regional regulations do you adhere to?
- Can a customer service or sales rep update user preferences easily?
- How do you handle historical data? Review all sources of existing data, and develop a plan to assign status and level of access.
- Do you allow subscribers to set how often they want to hear from you? Can you offer that frequency capping?
- Do you want new or different data than you now collect? To build trust, collect only the data that you intend to use in the next 6 months.
Contact Governance
Contact Governance Is a set of guiding principles for enterprise-wide data management and contact strategy. Control for frequency, message prioritization, and permission to honor subscriber preferences and provide the best customer experience.
The Customer Experience
Use a customer-first approach to ensure that you honor permission and understand customers’ implicit and explicit interests. Focus on the customer experience. Avoid over-communicating irrelevant content, which can lead to customer fatigue and attrition.
Data Standardization
Use a common data schema across brands and channels, allowing for a master record that ties to all customer data. Data standardization creates parity across brands, clusters, and the enterprise to avoid losing sight of the customer and valuable data attributes.
A governance center of excellence (COE) is a streamlined governance model for managing subscriptions, unsubscribe events, and new use cases for subscribers, account holders (nonloyalty), and loyalty members. Improve the customer experience and make data management simpler.
Creating these preferences involves the marketing and technology teams for segmentation, language, and channel. Prepare for this work, even if adoption is light at first. When your goals and priorities are aligned across brands, you’re ready to move into gathering technical requirements and scoping your project.
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