Nowadays, the average consumer is bombarded with messages from their favorite brands. And with the rise of mobile, brands also have new channels to approach the customer in an even more personal way. As a marketer, you are therefore increasingly looking for new ways to stay relevant. Personalization is key, and therefore you are always trying to tailor your product and communication to the customer's needs.
In doing so, it is evident that you interact on the channel that the customer prefers. Notifications from an order you just made via a mobile app come in as Push Notifications from that app. And the invoice after delivery by email for your archive. And the monthly newsletter per topic as Web Push notification?
That your customer wants to be in control over what they receive is nothing new. But with the rise of mobile and the range of possibilities that go with it, it's your job to make it easier for consumers to specify their preferences. This requires signing up, switching channels, and unsubscribing in an orderly fashion.
A Preference Center
A Preference Center allows you to build a healthy communication relationship with your audience. Here you find an easy way to indicate per channel what type of communication you want to receive. After your subscriber has given their consent, the message center always offers them the possibility to easily unsubscribe and subscribe again. And you might think that offering more options will lead to more unsubscribes. On the contrary, it turns out that providing an alternative actually causes someone not to unsubscribe entirely but to make a decision on a category-by-category basis. According to Marketing Week, when you invest in building a preference management strategy, you can drive up customer engagement and customer loyalty. A Preference Center is at the heart of this strategy.
How to build the Preference Center?
With Notificare there isn't any concept of mailing lists, instead you assign users to different categories (Tags) and use those to build their communication preferences. By allowing users to assign themselves to these topics, a specific communication preference is created. Only those users who have subscribed to these categories will then be eligible to receive your topic based messages. Simple as that.
As pointed out before, it is better to provide a clear unsubscribe option for your customer than to try to circumvent it, with the hope that it will make them less likely to opt-out. A clear overview of your subscriptions ensures less irritation, a better experience, and the possibility to unsubscribe only specific categories instead of messaging as a whole. By the way, in Email communications, you should always provide a direct unsubscribe link in addition to a reference to the preference center.
Are you ready to offer a preference center?
As part of our demo app and website, we have several examples available of how you can easily ask for preferences. If you need help with this, or are you unsure about the best implementation, don't hesitate to get in touch with one of our Engineers.