Preference Center: a brand’s trump card for improving customer relations 

Whether it is to strengthen your relationship with the customer or to personalise their experience, the Preference Center is a great resource for brands. And here’s why. 

OVERVIEW 

1. What is a Preference Center? 

2. What are the benefits of a Preference Center for users? 

3. How do users access their Preference Center? 

4. Why set up a Preference Center? 

1. What is a Preference Center? 

A Preference Center is an interface offered to contacts by a brand to help them subscribe to content and manage their subscription settings. 

This preference management centre allows your contacts to choose the types of communication campaigns they wish to receive (relational, transactional, promotional, management) regardless of the channel (email, SMS, social networks, etc.). 

2. What are the benefits of a Preference Center for users? 

Preference Centers offer many benefits. For one, they allow users to: 

• be informed about the use, management and storage (duration, location) of their data 
• indicate and update the information in their personal profile or customer area (contact details, date of birth, family situation, etc.) 
• select and prioritise the content they receive 

• choose and manage their consents for the communication channels through which they wish to be contacted (email, SMS, post, social networks, messaging, etc.) and even allow offers from the brand’s partners 
• set their marketing pressure by choosing the frequency with which they wish to be approached by the brand 
• affirm their trust in the brand 

Preference Center are therefore a good way for brands to give their customers, and prospective customers, the opportunity to manage their preferences.  

However, the benefits of Preference Center don’t stop there. Depending on the security of the data and the choices made by the brands and users, this space can be opened up to other possibilities. For instance, the user’s Preference Center might contain preferences relating to their loyalty programme, their purchases, their satisfaction, their opinions and ratings (on the brand’s website or those of its partners), etc. 

3. How do users access their Preference Center? 

Users can access their Preference Center at various key points in their customer journey: 

• when subscribing to a newsletter and, then, when they receive communications 
• when they access a website or online store to make a purchase or consult the site via their customer account 
• when they update their preferences from their customer area or personal profile on a website 

• when their intention is to unsubscribe, through a link at the bottom of an email that sends them to a landing page offering other alternatives 

For the Preference Center to be truly effective, however, users should be able to access it at any point in their customer journey (in-store, on their mobile phone, etc.). It might also be possible to make it available at the point of sale, for example, via a QR code so that users can access it at any time and change their preferences. The customer experience would then take on a whole new dimension. 

4. Why set up a Preference Center? 

Consumers are increasingly concerned about the use and retention of their personal data. 

Indeed, the reinforcement of regulations regarding privacy and consent management (GDPR, ePrivacy, etc.) is sensitising Internet users to the need to protect their personal data, which they are increasingly refusing to share in the face of this regulatory pressure. 

Now more than ever, compliance is a priority for companies, who not only need to remain GDPR compliant despite regular changes in legislation, but also : 

• Limit their bombardment of prospects and customers by taking their expectations into account 
• Reassure people with more transparency on the use and retention of personal data 
• Provide a better relational experience with content adapted to their contacts’ current interests and identifying key moments in their lives 
• Keep a maximum amount of clean and updated data on their contacts 

The Preference Center allows brands to address compliance and privacy issues, while preserving consumer data, strengthening customer relationships at different points in the customer journey and providing a personalised experience. 

In order for the Preference Center to be connected in real time with the different sources of contact information, it needs to be natively connected to a CDP like Scal-e. 

In this way, the CDP feeds data into the Preference Centre and vice versa. Preference Centres provide the CDP with an additional source of data to enrich customer insights within the CDP and improve the customer experience. That’s why Scal-e offers to use your existing Preference Center or create a new custom Preference Centre and connect it in real time to its CDP. 

Scal-e’s Digital Marketing Hub helps you improve customer relationships and create personalised customer experiences. Do you have ideas, ambitions or a project? 

Contact us

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Scal-e is a CDP (Customer Data Platform) that enables you to connect several data streams (website, points of sale and others) in a single datamart. In this way, brands can access their data, such as unified customer profiles and real-time information, to get to know their customers better and respond to their needs at the right time, through the right channel. From the same platform, brands can also build their marketing strategy (audience builder, scripting, planning, loyalty programme, preference centre) and apply it without having to change software.