A Step-by-Step Guide to Updating Your Preference Centre with Cloud Pages
 

By giving your audience control over the content they receive, you can significantly boost engagement and reduce unsubscribes. This guide will walk you through the process of updating your preference centre using Cloud Pages in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

The first step is to identify the main topics or updates your audience is most interested in, while also evaluating what you're currently offering. Crucially, you'll also need to bucket these topics into logical categories. Consider what content they find valuable and engaging, and how that aligns with your existing communications. Think about newsletters, event updates, product launches, or any other information that keeps them connected. These topics and categories will serve as the foundation for your preference centre and guide how you organise user options.

• Brainstorming New Topics: Start by brainstorming a list of all the potential topics your audience might want to receive updates about, including areas you may not have covered before.
• Evaluate Existing Communications: Review your current email campaigns, newsletters, and other communications. Identify the topics you're already covering and assess their performance.
• Bucket into Logical Categories: Group similar topics into logical categories. 
  For example:
  • Product Updates: (New Releases, Feature Updates, Technical Information)
  • Events: (Webinars, Conferences, Local Meetups)
  • Newsletters: (Weekly Digest, Monthly Summary, Industry News)
  • Promotions: (Special Offers, Discounts, Sales)
• Audience Research: Use surveys, feedback forms, or analytics to understand your audience's preferences and interests, and how they relate to both your current and potential content offerings.
• Prioritise and Align: Rank the new and existing topics and categories based on their relevance and importance to your audience, and ensure they align with your overall marketing strategy.<span class="highlight-invisible" title="Line Feed">U+000A</span>

Use Cloud Pages in Salesforce Marketing Cloud to design the interface of your preference centre. Cloud Pages provides a flexible platform to create custom web pages that integrate seamlessly with your marketing efforts.

• Navigate to Cloud Pages: Log in to your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account and navigate to Cloud Pages.
• Create a New Landing Page: Create a new landing page specifically for your preference centre.
• Design the Interface: Use the drag-and-drop interface or HTML editor to design the layout and appearance of your preference centre.
• Add Preference Options: Include checkboxes or radio buttons for each topic you identified in Step 1.
• Personalise with AMPscript: Incorporate AMPscript to dynamically display user preferences. This ensures that users see their current selections when they visit the preference centre.
  • Note: Correctly implementing AMPscript for this purpose requires retrieving data from your data extension or subscriber attributes. An incorrect implementation will not display user preferences. For more information, please consult the Salesforce Marketing Cloud documentation or a specialist.

AMPscript is used to display the current user preferences, but SSJS is what will be used to save the new preferences. This involves interacting with your data extension to store the updated preferences.

• Data Extension: Create a Data Extension that will store the users preferences. The data extension should contain at least the Subscriber Key as the primary key. Add a boolean field for each preference. If you are using preference attributes, make sure to add them to the data extension.
• SSJS: When the user clicks “save” on the cloud page, SSJS is used to update the data extension with the new preferences. This requires writing specific SSJS code to retrieve the subscriber key, capture the selected preferences from the form fields, and then use functions like 'LookupRows()', 'UpdateDE()', or 'InsertDE()' to interact with the data extension.
• Error Handling: Use 'try...catch' blocks in SSJS to handle potential data extension update failures. This ensures that errors are caught and handled gracefully.

Important Note: Implementing SSJS to interact with data extensions requires familiarity with SSJS syntax and Marketing Cloud's data model. If you're not comfortable writing SSJS code, consult the Salesforce Marketing Cloud documentation or seek assistance from a Marketing Cloud specialist.

Once you have completed the creation of your cloud page, you will need to publish it.

• Click the publish button within cloud pages.
• Copy the URL of the published cloud page.
• Add the URL to your email footers, or any other location where you want to provide users with access to the preference centre.

Before going live, it's crucial to test your preference centre thoroughly.

• Internal Testing: Share the preference centre link with your internal team and ask them to test it thoroughly.Cross-Device Testing: Test the preference centre on various devices and browsers to ensure compatibility.
• Data Validation: Verify that user preferences are being saved correctly in your data extension.
• User Experience (UX) Review: Evaluate the user experience and make any necessary adjustments to improve usability.
• Email Client Testing: Test with different email clients to ensure the link to the preference centre works correctly.
• Data Set Testing: Test with various data sets (e.g., existing subscribers, new subscribers).
• Edge Case Testing: Test edge cases, such as users with no preferences selected.

The best practice for this (and to avoid overly complicated SSJS solutions) is to set up a Journey in Journey Builder where modifications to the Data Extension from the Cloud Page pushes the subscriber into a simple journey.

The journey then has an Update Salesforce Object activity in it, This is where you can choose to take the new subscription values from your Data Extension and make updates to the  relevant Consent Object in your CRM for example, thus closing the loop. 

As an example, you might have a list of consents and your subscriber wants to remove themselves from Event Marketing only. Then simply go to the Preference Page and untick this preference, this will then update the preference data extension in Marketing Cloud and fire them into the update journey. The update Object activity will then target the Event Marketing Consent object in Salesforce and change them to Opt Out, maintaining Salesforce as the single source of truth and making reporting on prospective audience counts easy and doubly ensuring that the subscriber preferences are respected with regards to Event Marketing communications.

Remember to consider data privacy and compliance regulations, such as GDPR, when implementing your preference centre.

• Ensure you have proper consent for collecting and storing user preferences.
• Provide clear opt-out options and respect user choices.
• Implement security measures to protect user data.

Go Live and Monitor

Once you've completed testing and made any necessary adjustments, it's time to go live with your updated preference centre.

• Update Email Templates: Update your email templates to include a link to the new preference centre.
• Monitor Engagement: Track engagement metrics, such as open rates and click-through rates, to assess the effectiveness of your updated preference centre.
• Gather Feedback: Continue to gather feedback from your audience and make ongoing improvements.

Ready to revitalise your audience engagement? Try updating your preference centre today!
Need help? Reach out and one of our Salesforce consultants will help you.