Subscription management pages, also known as preference centers, are proven to decrease overall unsubscribe numbers by allowing your contacts to select which of your emails they want to receive. When asked whether they want to be completely out of the loop or only receive specific emails based on their needs, “fear of missing out” prevails so you are likely to still have that one contact to continue to market to.
The out-of-the-box subscription management page from Eloqua is as simple as things can get… click here or here or here. Done.
The solution can be branded, but only to a certain extent. More often than not, our clients opt for a custom preference center so they can have a fully branded landing page that is consistent with their entire website, and they can use it to drive subscriptions and not limit themselves to only asking contacts to manage preferences.
Now that you have your custom preference center that took time to plan, develop, ensure brand consistency, countless test records to ensure the correct email groups are subscribed, you’re seeing the results – lower unsubscribe rates. BUT… have you really been monitoring the page?
Did you check your Email or Campaign Reports?
Whether it’s Insight or Operational reports, what you will find is that your global unsubscribes from your preference center are not associated to any campaigns or emails.
This is invaluable information that your organization is missing out on. By looking at the number of unsubscribes from each campaign or email, you will see what worked and what didn’t work.
What made you lose your contacts?
What kept most of them from unsubscribing?
These reports and subsequent questions/answers are how you grow as a marketing team to ensure that you engage your customers and retain contacts.
With the out-of-the-box subscription option, all global unsubscribes are associated automatically with the email and the subsequent campaign that they came from. However, when you create your own custom preference center, the actions needed are often (if not always) forgotten. It is challenging to break down the actions taken by Eloqua in order to associate those global unsubscribes that very few (if any) consultants or developers have tried/succeeded in associating them.
At Tegrita, we have found a solution for this issue. We were able to crack the work-around by breaking down multiple (possibly intentionally confusing) custom Eloqua URLs in order to better understand the problem. We found that it is impossible to associate Email Group subscribes/unsubscribes to campaigns or emails. This means that although you can report on which of your emails/campaigns had a certain number of global unsubscribes, you cannot report on what email/campaign impacted the subscription rate of a specific email group.
Our Solution
We are now able to create a custom preference center for your organization that will automatically associate any global unsubscribes to both the email assets and the campaigns. This is now our proven practice and will be offered to all our clients as part of the preference center build.
We will also offer the option to include a separate build that will give you the ability to report on which of your campaigns/emails impacted your subscription rates for each email group. This will enable you to grow and build your future email marketing to ensure the best possible responses from your database of contacts.*
We believe that by giving you these tools and showing you how to use them in the best possible way, we can help your organization grow in ways you never thought possible. To find out more about how we can help you, or to discuss the solution, please contact us today.
*NOTE: This custom reporting solution requires the Eloqua Analyzer license. This is not available with basic Insight.