Where do you store your email preferences data?

[Conor_Fitzpatri]

Hi All,

I'm in the process of building out our email preferences center, but was hoping to take a different angle on the topic and ask where you store your lead's email preferences as opposed to the nuts and bolts of setting one up. My initial gut feeling is to create fields in SFDC so they are easily visible and accessible, but one of my colleagues brought up an intriguing idea to use SFDC Campaigns. For example, the campaign would be "Blog Posts" and then we can use member status to capture frequency such as "Once every two weeks". I like the idea of cutting down on the amount of fields, but the visibility won't be as great.

I'd love to know your thoughts in terms of scalability and reporting.

Thanks in advance!

Conor

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Conor,

Campaign member / program member and static lists are often good alternatives to creating fields, although they will not be used as easily as simple checkbox fields by SFDC users.

Anyway, you will need fields in Marketo to display them in your preference center forms, so...

-Greg

[Josh_Hill13]

Check boxes are still required to manage this. I spoke about Campaign Member Status use way back when, but decided against it because of the amount of extra workflows to maintain it, which Greg is alluding to.

The real question is how many types of comms will you want to manage and do you think it will matter much? You do not have to put the fields in SFDC unless Sales or record keeping requires it. I usually do so, but not always.

If you want to manage frequency there are several threads here on this to look at. Also:

• use Email Frequency field and setup workflows and Comms limits. Requires a fair amount of work.
• Blog RSS Feeds are easier to maintain and if you use Digesto or Feedblitz, you may be able to control this more easily for the lead.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

This idea would make it much more straightforward and secure to manage preferences:

-Greg