Email Subscription Center Workflow

[mikaelakelly]

We are working on creating an Email Subscription Center to allow our users to select which emails they want to receive instead of the standard unsubscribe option, which currently unsubscribes our users from everything. I have found a lot of documentation on setting up the Email Subscription Center, however, I cannot find documentation on how to set up a workflow to tell Marketo which emails are which. For example, if someone selects that they only want to receive Newsletter emails, how do we tell Marketo which emails are Newsletters? Any suggestions/guidance are appreciated! 

Thanks, 

Mikaela

[Christiane_Rode]

How are you currently building your smart lists to distribute these emails? These fields can be used as filters in your smart lists to filter in (or out) the users who indicate certain preferences. 

So, if you have a boolean field called Newsletters, and someone fills out the form to say they want to receive your newsletters (field is True), then, when building your distribution for that program, you'd set your smart list to include only those where "Newsletter" is set to "True."

[mikaelakelly]

Thank you Christiane! Very helpful! 

[Darshil_Shah1]

Well, Marketo cannot distinguish different types of emails on its own. In most cases, users would have separate send campaigns/email programs for sending out different kinds of email communications to people, and based on the type of email the campaign/email program is meant to send, you can include the apt subscription's preferences filter in the smart list to ensure only eligible and subscribed people for the respective type of email communication qualify for the email send flow. I'd also advise you to use the standardized naming convention for naming different kinds of emails, so you can use that as a criterion in the smart list too, e.g., the name contains NWSL for newsletter emails, WBR for webinar emails, etc. to filter people based on their respective type of emails engagement metrics.

[SanfordWhiteman]

N.B. I don’t recommend Boolean fields as they don’t capture enough information. Instead, use DateTime fields, which indicate someone’s interest and exactly when they subscribed to a given type.

[Jo_Pitts1]

@mikaelakelly, just to extend on @SanfordWhiteman's point; I completely agree with Sanford about using a datetime.  In your smart list, you can test for is not empty.  If someone wants to unsubscribe from a topic then set the date field to NULL.

If you or your team are comfortable with JS, you can easily have checkboxes on the front end form that translate to date values in underlying Marketo form and then into the Marketo database.  If you aren't so comfortable with JS, then you may want to adopt a hybrid approach.  Use Booleans for your subscription types on your form, and have matching date fields for each that aren't on the form.  Use triggered campaigns for each of the Booleans that based on the new value (i.e. newsletterSubscription is True or newsletterSubscription is False)  sets the date value (i.e. newsletterSubscriptionDate = {{system.datetime}} or newsletterSubscriptionDate = NULL) in the flow step.

Having these date fields is useful in a number of cases.  One example is in the case where you need to re-compliance people i.e. depending on your jurisdiction/level of corporate responsibility you need to confirm if someone still wants to receive a specific content type annually you can use the (e.g) newsletterSubscriptionDate value to determine when to automatically place them into the re-compliancing process for newsletters.

Also, make sure you still leave Marketo's durable unsubscribe as an option for people on your form.  Because the durable unsubscribe goes across duplicates and handles deletions and then re-insertion of records it is incredibly robust.  Imagine a scenario where jdoe@gmail.com unsubscribes.  You clean up data and delete the record.  Then you purchase a list (yuck, but people do it) and jdoe@gmail.com is in the list again.  You email them.  J Doe files a complaint under the relevant legislation for your jurisdiction.  PAINFUL!!!  However, if you've used durable unsubscribe, then they won't get the email, and you and your legal team now have time for an extra coffee!