Legacy: About preferences

What are preferences? 

With Preferences you can easily manage the requests of your contacts about the sort of messages they are interested to receive. Your contacts may be interested in your products, or in your trainings, in your events, or newsletters. If they are interested in one type of message, that means they have that preference. Your contacts may have multiple preferences at the same time. 

How do preferences work in Flexmail? 

You create the name of the preference in the preference center, based on the categories of interests you suspect your audience may have, or on the type of message you are planning to send. Next, you can add preferences to any opt-in or update form. Therefore, you allow your contacts to, themselves, tell you the type of content they are interested in.

What can you do with preferences in Flexmail? 

Preferences are choices, expressed directly from your contacts about the sort of content they would like to receive. Therefore, Flexmail gives you several options to use preferences to fine-tune the audience of your campaigns or to understand the interests of your contacts better. 

Segments

During the launch of a campaign, you can already use preferences to send messages. However, sending a message to a segment instead, allows you to send your message to a pre-created group of contacts based on multiple criteria - not just preferences and not just one preference. The preferences can be a building block in creating those segments. 

And vice versa, you can apply a preference to any contact in a certain segment. When contacts are added to a segment, you can add a preference to those contacts automatically, by clicking on the advanced settings in the segmentation. The preferences you choose there, will be added to the contacts who are added to the segment.

Dynamic Content

Via Dynamic Content, based on the condition whether a particular contact belongs (or does not belong) to a particular preference group, you may decide to show them a certain part of your message. 

Campaigns

You can send campaigns based on preferences. During the process of launching a campaign, you will be asked who will receive your message. You may choose a particular preference group to receive your campaign. Preferences will be one criterion, and you can use multiple criteria deciding who will be the recipients.

Workflows

Based on preferences you can create automatic workflows. You could trigger an action, for example sending a message to a contact, based on whether they belong or not to a preference. The action could be triggered as soon as the contact enters or leaves the preference group. Or, based on another trigger, you may remove or add a preference to a contact. 

Export

You can export all contacts having a particular preference. If you want to manually analyse the contact information of preference groups, you can export a partial database with those only. 

How do contacts end up in a preference?

Ideally, you want to keep the choice of preference to your contacts. However, there are multiple ways someone could end up in a preference. 

Opt-in form 

Each opt-on form has a section with preferences where a contact can subscribe to a preference group. While creating the form you may choose to add any preferences to the form, as well as whether to have it selected by default, and whether to make choosing the preference a required action while filling out the opt-in form. 

Import of contacts 

When you import a contact into your database, you can already give them a preference. You do this by creating a column with the title preferences and entering the names of the preferences in that column, separated with a comma. The preferences must have the exact same name as in your account in order for them to be assigned correctly.

Personal edits 

At any point you can go into the Contacts database and give a preference to a contact manually.

Workflows

Based on various triggers, you may add or remove any contacts from your preference group - based on how they interact with a certain campaign, form, survey, or URL. 

Preference center

In your preference center you can:

• Create, edit or remove preferences
• View the contact list with a certain preference
• Export contacts with a certain preference
• Assign or remove a preference from a certain segment

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