SOP for Email Subscription Center

[Stephen_Jeong1]

Hello,

I'm considering building out an email subscription center and I have a handle on how to create all the campaigns/fields/landing page in the back end but what I am having difficulty working through is how to create a standard operating procedure once this subscription center is rolled out.

We have multiple people across different teams that leverage Marketo to send out emails and when I imagine rolling out a subscription center, I see too many scenarios where people will not put the correct filter into their smart campaigns and they will email people who opted out from a particular type of mailing.

If you've successfully rolled out a subscription center to your company, I would love to hear your feedback and see what worked and what didn't work. Thanks!

[Kristen_Malkov1]

I love creating an "opt-in" channel tag. This allows you to track how many people come into your system from your opt-in. Also, you can create program steps for opting back in or the different "levels" of subscription. Also good to remember to keep the subscription field a multi-select pick list. 🙂

[Josh_Hill13]

I disagree that the subscription would be a multi select. Marketo doesn't handle that well and it's much better to separate out potential subs because you might remove them later, but also because more countries require date stamping (Canada, Germany) by field to demonstrate a lead opted in.

I've written a lot about this on my blog and slideshares, so check those out.

The key part is to make sure your process is legal for the countries you operate in/sell to. That generally means always using Opt In, having an unsub method, not using pre-check, and date/IP stamp the change in a log. Marketo will generally keep the log entry, but you might as well put it all in fields.

http://www.slideshare.net/jdavidhill/marketo-email-reputation-management

As for keeping people in line, you just have to train them what the fields are, how they are used, and which standing smart lists/static lists to use.

I usually prefer to say "use subscription field X=T" and that will work. Marketo will block bad leads/unsubs.