It’s essential to respect the preferences of your mailing list subscribers and deliver relevant content. One way to achieve this is by creating an email preference centre.

Technical Level: 2 out of 5
Read time: 3 mins
Who should read this?: Any Keap user responsible for designing email broadcasts.

In this guide, we’ll explore why you should invest in building an email preference centre and how it can benefit both subscribers and your marketing results.

More likely than not, we have built an email preference centre for you already in your Keap CRM app. If not, or if you are not using it, please get in touch with us and we’ll help you get it going in minutes.

1 Enhance User Experience

Providing subscribers with the ability to customise their email preferences improves the overall user experience. Subscribers appreciate you respecting their time and their inbox. When they can choose the type and frequency of emails they receive, you can deliver more relevant and valuable messages. They’re more likely to stay engaged (open and click your emails) and less likely to mark messages as spam.

2 Reduce Unsubscribes

When subscribers receive too many irrelevant emails, they’re more likely to unsubscribe. An email preference centre can help prevent this by allowing users to opt-out of specific email types, or reduce email frequency. This reduces the risk of losing subscribers altogether and helps maintain a healthy email list.

3 Improve Email Inbox Placement

Email preference centres help you maintain a clean and engaged list of email recipients. Higher open and click rates and lower unsubscribes improves the chances of ALL emails reaching your recipients’ inboxes and not their spam folders.

4 Gather Valuable Data for Targeted Sales

Email preference centres also serve as a source of valuable data. By tracking subscriber preferences, you gain insight into their interests. This information can help you segment your email list more effectively, create personalised content and target specific customer segments with relevant offers.

5 Build Trust and Transparency

Transparency is essential in email marketing. Providing subscribers with an easy way to manage their preferences demonstrates your commitment to transparency and respect for their choices. Building trust with your audience can lead to increased loyalty and long-term customer relationships.

6 Adapt to Changing Preferences

Subscriber preferences can change over time. What was relevant to them a year ago may not be relevant today. An email preference centre allows subscribers to update their preferences as their interests evolve, ensuring your emails remain aligned with their current needs and preferences.

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So, if you haven’t already, consider building an email preference centre by using a Keap web form or landing page with custom Yes/No fields.

We have created “Mailing List” custom fields in your Keap app, for this purpose. For example:

• List: News
• List: Ownership
• List: Events

You may have other types of email content or choices for your mailing list subscribers.

At the bottom of ALL of your email broadcasts, we recommend ALWAYS including a link to this email preference centre so your mailing list subscribers can constantly choose what emails they wish to, or wish not to, receive.

This article dives into some detail about combatting regular email deliverability issues.

Technical Level: 5 out of 5
Read time: 5 mins
Who should read this?: Any Keap user responsible for optimising Keap mailing list quality, and in particular IT members / sub-contractors.

Two common issues

Here are two common issues that stem from your domain having an uncertain email reputation.

Emails are occasionally bounced automatically

Some email services are renowned for employing over-sensitive spam filters. Bigpond and Hotmail are two email services that come to mind.

These spam filters can reject some emails from being delivered entirely, if they are unsure about your email reputation. This is obviously far worse than placing emails into spam folders.

Firstly, the recipient will never see your email – not even in their spam / junk folder.

Second, the recipient’s email address status will now be set to ‘Bounced’ in Keap – permanently – until you reactivate it.

Subscribers are occasionally unsubscribed automatically

To comply with legal requirements, all email marketing services like Keap include unsubscribe links in the footer of each message.

Some email service spam filters click all links in a message to check that the links do not contain malware, if they are not sure about your email reputation.

On occasions, spam filters even click the unsubscribe link in messages. As a result, contacts are sometimes unsubscribed without their knowledge.

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How to monitor unsubscribes and bounces

Read our how to proactively manage email status issues article and watch the video. This details an important process to follow regularly, to try and catch any accidental unsubscribes or bounces from contacts.

It is a difficult process as there is no foolproof way of knowing which unsubscribes and bounces are valid and which ones are errors. Typically, review each long-time client or contact who unsubscribes.

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What to do to help maximise your email reputation

The sad news is there is no fool-proof way to avoid accidental unsubscribes, temporary bounces or your emails landing in spam folders. But there are ways to significantly reduce those issues.

• Configure DKIM, SPF and DMARC
• Optimise your email content
• Configure an Email Preference Centre
• Ask your recipients to whitelist you

Configure DKIM, SPF and DMARC

There are technical actions to undertake. DKIM, SPF and DMARC are essentially records added to your domain that increases the security of your domain and increases your email reputation in many recipient email servers. This means spam filters are less likely to need to click all links to test them.

Read our article How to enable Keap outbound emails for more information.

Optimise your email content

Optimising your email content to maximise deliverability and open rates, is not an exact science. But there are certainly good practices to follow.

Read our top 10 tips to maximise open rates.

Configure an Email Preference Centre

An email preference centre is essentially a web form or landing page that allows your contacts to opt in, or out of, certain types of email content you are sending. Links to the email preference centre should be included in every email broadcast you send.

Even if contacts opt out of all content options, that very action of clicking in to update their email preferences is an ‘engagement’ with your emails, which aids your email reputation.

We can help you configure an email preference centre and detail how to share it to all recipients.

Ask subscribers to whitelist / allowlist you

Below you’ll find step-by-step instructions for your contacts to whitelist your sender email address, in the most common email clients and providers. 

Yes, this is difficult to get your mailing subscribers to do. But it greatly helps if they do.

We recommend each recipient performs their own search on how to add safe senders on their email client/email host service. However, the below can provide a guide for them.