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Preference centers can be a great tool for building engagement and trust between brands and their customers.
Ping. “Don’t bother me.”
Consumers don’t like being reminded to buy something. But they will tolerate it if they have some say in how they are notified.
Preference centers are emerging as a way for digital marketers to stay in touch with their customers without displeasing them. Brands can set-up a front-end where consumers can choose how often they want to be notified, through which channel, as well as what kind of information they are interested in hearing about.
The technique yields zero-party data and can be used to build a long-term customer relationships. But trust is required, so don’t be evil. Customers will enter this bargain so long as you promise to respect their wishes and keep their data private.
Back in the Stone Age…
…marketers tried hard to figure out how often they could contact their customers, usually via e-mail. Even time of day and the substance of the message were taken into account as “judgment factors”. But that approach was not foolproof.
“Email marketing can cause inbox fatigue.” noted Alex Cash, director of strategy at OneTrust PreferenceChoice, which offers a consent and preference management platform. “As people have become flooded with marketing emails over the past few years, they become irritated and sometimes ignore inboxes altogether. Unfortunately for marketers, this means fewer opens and more unsubscribes.”
“Our pockets have been buzzing and beeping more [in] the years since the introduction of the iPhone.” said Nirish Parsad, practice lead for privacy, identity and marketing tech at Tinuiti. “We’ve got text messages, push notifications, and various forms of in-app notifications, all fighting for some attention. So, the shortcomings? If your comms strategy in 2022 is just email, that’s a lot of effort for a 20% open rate, if you’re lucky.”
“In the past, B2B and B2C both had very detailed and granular preference centers, with the hopes of limiting the number of unsubscribes, but that over-complicated the operation.” said Lauren Harrison, senior marketing consultant at CloudKettle, a consulting firm. Sometimes firms asked for too much information. “Preferences were ignored, and recipients stopped wanting to fill the whole form out.” she said.
Ready, ask, aim, fire
So why not ask the customer how they want to be informed, and let them set the controls? That sounds easy. But marketers must give a lot of thought to how they want to set up a preference center. What information can you ask for without frustrating the customer? You don’t need to find out their entire life story when you ask them to fill out a form.
“Think about your onboarding experiences, quizzes and surveys, and areas where preferences can be remembered to make the experience better.” Parsad said. “Customers want personalization, so it’s important to use this information to transform the web experience. You’re learning a lot more about them than just their name, email and address.”
Cash put the preference center in a strategic context, as part of a data management strategy. “Marketers should look for solutions that can integrate with existing customer journeys and UIs like webforms, whilst also providing flexible UIs out of the box for additional data and consent capture.” he said.
“A preference center is not an ideal place for data collection for B2B and B2C, as it really should empower the user to manage how they would like to be communicated.” Harrison said. “In collecting information about [the customer] and their preferences, you are allowing them to control the content.”
