How Do you Make a Marketo Subscriber Preference Center?

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I need to know how to make a Marketo Subscriber Preference Center.

Right now, if a recipient of the E-mail clicks on the Unsubscribe button at the bottom, it takes them to an LP with a form to unsubscribe from ALL Email communications.

How do you create different classifications of Emails? (e.g. how do you identify if an Email is a Product Email, an Educational Email, a Press Release Announcement Email, etc.) and then have it so that users can unsubscribe can unsubscribe from different types of emails (or they can also select all of them at once)?

Thanks.

-Tal

[Jackie_Potts]

We set up our email preference center based on the types of emails that we send so I feel like it is somewhat custom to each user. Just make sure the customer can understand what they would sign up for with the email preferences.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the response.

Say we have an idea in place on this in terms of the different categories involved. How do we actually tag emails to identify if it's actually a Product Email, Educational Email, etc?

Is there somewhere in the Email Asset that I can state "Category of Email" or something like that? And then the Subscriber Preference Center would correspond with that?

[SanfordWhiteman]

The tie-ins between user preference fields and, for example, Program Tags will not happen automatically.

Even if you use the exact same nomenclature in both places (and you should, for clarity's sake) you still need to build Smart Campaign filters and flow actions accordingly.

And at the email level, other than naming conventions for the email itself there's no way to signal such a connection.

Building and maintaining these connections is an important part of a well-run instance, but if you're hoping you're missing something that'll make it happen automatically, you're not.

[Dan_Stevens_]

As Sanford mentioned, once you deploy a preference center, you really need to ensure each and every one of your programs/email-send campaigns have the required filters to make sure you're suppressing those people who have not subscribed to that type of content (if they haven't opted in to all).  There are a couple of existing ideas posted by Grégoire Michel that would make this process much easier to manage:

[Amy_Goldfine]

The thing to understand about a Preference Center is that you have to manage it internally. Everything is based off field value and smart lists. It is very easy to ignore preferences when sending an email if you're not careful.

I recommend coming up with a strategy and documenting it. Brainstorm every type of email you think you'll send, and match it to a preference category. And then have a ruthless QA process when you do your sends to make sure you're respecting those categories.

It might make sense to create program templates for different categories so you don't have to think about the smart list when you create the program. A simple example would be if you send mailbox blasts in categories "Resources", "Webinars", and "Events". So your program templates would be this:

1. Name: EB YYYY-MM-DD Resource Email

Smart List: Resources = True

2. Name: EB YYYY-MM-DD Webinar Email

Smart List: Webinars = True

3. Name: EB YYYY-MM-DD Event Email

Smart List: Events = True

We don't use any program tags (other than Channel, of course) but you could add tags to the templates too.

As for how you actually set up the fields and landing page, there are lots of blog posts on the Nation and external sites.

[Jay_Jiang]

Unfortunately Marketo doesn't come with certain pre-built features like Hubspot does, a pre-built preference centre being one.

We spent a good couple of days setting up and testing our preference centre and the result was way better than any out of the box solution. Managing lists is an ongoing task though.

You will need a developer or consultant to build something decent though.

[Anonymous]

Hello Tal,

I've found really helpful following article when I built our preference center;

Building a Full Subscription Center in Marketo - Marketing Rockstar Guides

Good Luck!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

It's almost impossible to answer this question in simple way because so many things will influence the design of your PC:

• What type of org are you in? An SMB with a local market ? A large multi-national company having to deal with different opt-in/opt-out regulations?
• What is you marketing plan made of and what kind of preferences do you want to offer?
• How skilled are you local and central Marketo users?
• How evolutive to do you think the options list will be in the future?
• Can you get hold of a JS developper to assist with the implementation of some more sophisticated features?

Based on the answers to these questions, your PC will have to be setup completely differently (from a simple PC with a limited set of functionality to a PC frameworks that can be rolled out in multiple countries with significant local adaptation. And the only thing that is certain is that there is no one-size-fits all approach.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Thanks everyone for the responses and Gregoire specifically.

It almost seems like we'd need to leverage a certified Consultant to build this out efficiently. That's what I gather from the consensus above.

Now, to answer your questions Gregoire:

-Luckily, we don't have strict geographical suppression as we only market to North America right now, meaning Canada and the US, with the US being our primary target market. So luckily, no local adaptation is required as the 1 language we communicate in is English (we may expand to Spanish and French down the road but that's many years down the road and not a concern right now).

We are an SMB and market to Mid-Markets but we also work through primarily a Partner Marketing model. Luckily, the back-end of separating Partner Leads from one another is all taken care of within our Salesforce instance, and I'm able to filter them appropriately within separate lists.

-We haven't fully defined the categories for the PC out yet but theoretically, we're looking at maybe 4-5 separate topics, as well as an "Opt out of all comms" as a 6th.

-The list may involve in the future a little bit but will stay relatively the same if we define those categories accurately in the present time.

-In terms of skill, I'm pretty good with Marketo but there's still a lot I have to learn. There's so much more in the system that I don't know how to do that hopefully I can learn over-time.

-I can probably get a hold of a JS developer, but do you think just working with a straight-up Marketo Consultancy would be the best avenue to pursue to get this implemented in properly?

Hopefully that gives you a better sense of our situation.

-Tal