Add global compliance and cultural custom to the list of why email preference centers are really hard to sell internally and build well. I had a meeting this morning where we started to list out all the different country and local laws governing choices across various brand service agreements, and it quickly became overwhelming. It was no help that the database guy kept saying, "That'll cost you more."


No wonder the director of marketing looked at me and said, "Is this really the best way to spend our precious time, energy and IT resources?!"
So many email marketers say that they know a preference center will enable more choices and value for subscribers–particularly as we build relationships across a matrix of brands, social networks and email message types. Do moms want to be alerted via email to community discussions on Facebook? Do business users want LinkedIn weekly news headlines but prefer event invites via email? Are Australians particularly sensitive to "service" messages in the guise of marketing?
We'd all like to give our customers and prospects those choices. Does it have to be that hard to build such a self selection tool that will actually work?
We are already fighting hard to get a preference center on the planning table. Management wants us to keep the list large and growing, and to send more messages rather than fewer. There are penalties to not offering preferences, usually too high frequency with low relevance. These strategies (or lack of strategy) will quickly depress inbox placement due to higher complaints (clicks on the Report Spam button at Gmail, Yahoo! or in Outlook). An untargeted approach also churns the file, reduces response rates and lowers lifetime value.
Those penalties are real, but the pressure is also real to accept the long term hit for a short term gain. Selling a preference center internally often fails because fundamentally, most companies don't want to give up control. We want to keep our marketing options wide open. If we respect subscriber preferences, we may not be able to e-mail anything we want at any time.
Yikes. It's hard to compete with that sort of thinking, especially if the IT team is telling management that building a preference center is costly and time consuming.
There are soft costs to every marketing decision–and particularly when it comes to subscriber-centric ones like lowering frequency to increase relevancy, removing inactive/non responsive addresses from the file–and building a preference center where subscribers can choose their own message types and frequency.
Advocating for these things can quickly make the email marketing person very unpopular. That's no fun, even if you know you are representing a good cause: The interests of your customers.
The ways that I've been successful advocating preference centers and improving relevancy by sending fewer messages with higher relevancy always couples the hard costs, real rewards, lost opportunity value, and the impact of those longer term "soft costs."

1. Revenue–now and later. Sending information that subscribers want, even if it's less frequent, will earn higher response now, and improve the chances that subscribers will continue to engage and respond in the future. Prove your revenue opportunity by measuring for the same set of subscribers, the difference in response rates between messages that have explicit permission (information specifically requested by this subscriber) and messages with assumed permission (everything else). That lift can range between 2% and 200%, and is generally what you can expect to earn in overall revenue by targeting all your e-mail marketing by preference.


2. Cost. Over mailing or sending irrelevant and untargeted e-mail messages has a cost .... both in opportunity and real dollars. Subscribers who do not find value will complain (clicking the Report Spam button) which depresses inbox placement for all your messages. If you don't reach the inbox, you can't earn a response. There is also a small but real cost and wasted marketing resource (pennies per message) to sending e-mail that no one is interested in reading.


3. Data. Subscribers tell you about their interests and needs when they visit the preference center. Use that data to guide social and other digital content and improve the depth of connection with prospects and customers.


4. Persona. Customers are not all created equally, and nor do they have static needs. All great B2B marketing operates dynamically within the sales lifecycle. Preference center data identifies subscribers who are moving in the cycle or have new needs (e.g.: changing content selections) or are feeling neglected (e.g.: lowering the frequency). Use that data to guide segmentation and targeting, and sales team outreach.


5. Investment pays off. If you build it, they may not come. A preference center has to be marketed in order to provide value. Be sure to celebrate your preference center in the welcome message, on the unsubscribe page, in your website navigation, via Twitter, in your footer and with dedicated e-mail messages. Like any other feature of your website, a preference center must have real value or it won't be used.