Rethinking Preference Centres: Smarter Ways to Personalise

Rethinking Preference Centres: Smarter Ways to Personalise.

In email marketing, preference centres have long been promoted as a best-practice tool for improving engagement. Giving subscribers control over what they receive, how often, and on which topics seems like the ultimate way to respect their choices.

When done well, preference centres deliver real value: subscribers feel in control, marketers reduce list churn, and brands collect meaningful zero-party data (information willingly shared). Instead of sending the same content to everyone, they enable more targeted messaging for stronger engagement.

In theory, it’s a win-win. In practice, they’re often harder to implement and less effective than expected – sometimes delivering disappointing results.

The Reality Check: Why Most Preference Centres Fall Short

The biggest challenge? Unless you capture preferences at sign-up, it’s hard to get existing contacts to engage. Back-populating an established list with preference data is difficult – even with incentives like discounts, giveaways, prompts, and reminders. Typically, only 2–5% of subscribers update their preferences when asked.

Meanwhile, inbox providers like Gmail and Apple Mail now offer one-click unsubscribes, making opting out easier than updating preferences. Faced with the choice, most take the path of least resistance and unsubscribe.

Execution is another stumbling block. If a business collects preferences but doesn’t actively use them to shape email strategy, the whole exercise becomes a meaningless box-ticking process.

Turning Preferences into Performance

Collecting data is just the first step – the value lies in how it’s used. Many brands gather preferences but fail to integrate them into segmentation or content strategies.
Before launching a preference centre, it’s important to consider how responses will feed into workflows, segmentation rules, and content planning. Without a clear plan, you risk creating static data points or overly complex setups that drain resources.

Marketers need clear objectives. Are you aiming to reduce unsubscribes, improve engagement through personalisation, or streamline journeys? Each goal requires a different approach and carries unique trade-offs. For example, reducing send volume may lower churn but also limit exposure to the ‘long tail’ segment of contacts who could convert with more frequent touch points.

Two core models can guide your approach:

• Opt-down: All contacts receive everything by default; they can opt out of specific categories or reduce frequency.

• Opt-up: Contacts receive a standard cadence and can opt in to extra campaigns based on their interests.

Opt-up typically produces leaner, more qualified sends; while opt-down maintains broader reach. Whichever you choose, set a baseline contact frequency to keep even lightly engaged segments connected. Some platforms also allow hybrid approaches where you can use automations and stated preferences to further personalise campaigns

The key is to start simple. Avoid granular options that add complexity for minimal gain. Focus on a few clear, actionable categories that align with your brand and content pillars to keep messaging relevant and production manageable.

Smarter Segmentation Through Progressive Profiling

Most subscribers won’t update their preferences – so building your whole strategy around the few who do isn’t viable. To engage the rest, combine zero-party data with first-party behavioural signals such as browsing patterns, email clicks, and purchases to base your segmentation on product affinity.

This requires a connected digital ecosystem – CRM, website, POS, call centre, media channels, and event tools should share event data across all touchpoints. Without this, segmentation is limited to what people say rather than what they do.

For example, if a subscriber never selects preferences but repeatedly engages with skincare content and purchases anti-ageing products, you can automatically segment them accordingly. Progressive profiling allows profiles to evolve with behaviour in addition to stated preferences, ensuring content remains timely and relevant without manual updates.

This approach also prevents disengagement. Behaviour-driven triggers – such as product views, category clicks, or repeat purchases – surface the right message at the right time, improving engagement and conversion without relying solely on form submissions.

Targeting vs. Personalisation

Product affinity segmentation isn’t just about narrowcasting campaigns to smaller audience groups who are most likely to engage with the message. While this approach will undoubtedly increase engagement rates and ensure healthy deliverability, the downsides can be a risk of undermailing or neglecting certain segments and sacrificing volume – leaving potential revenue on the table.

An alternative is to use segmentation to personalise every email, maximising the impact of each touchpoint. For example, if segmentation shows a clear preference for a product category, create 2–3 hero creative variations for a broadcast campaign. If your platform supports dynamic product boxes, configure them to display items from the recipient’s preferred categories.

This way, you put preference data to work without over-targeting or sacrificing reach in pursuit of metrics that don’t truly drive the bottom line.

The Final Word: Strategy Over Set-and-Forget

Preference centres still have value, especially at sign-up when engagement is highest. But they’re not a silver bullet. Without an ongoing strategy to enrich and act on the data, they risk becoming dormant fields in your ESP.

A modern email strategy blends zero-party and first-party data, maintains list hygiene, and continuously refines segmentation to reflect real customer behaviour. If you collect preferences, honour them in targeting, cadence, and content. Then layer in behavioural insights to fill gaps and adapt as interests change.

With the right infrastructure and data flow, you can deliver personalised experiences that remain relevant, scalable, and impactful – whether or not a subscriber ever updates their preferences.