Speaker 0: Slide deck, and we will dive in. I do want to do quick introductions, and then I will let them kind of take over. But we have Aaron Beatty and Steven Roper here who will be walking us through a little Alice in Wonderland today.

Speaker 1: That is right. Yeah. Give me just a second here. I think we are almost there.

Speaker 0: Okay. Uh, while you get that pulled up, I do want to thank all of our speakers. Without them, this this wouldn’t be happening as well as our supporters and sponsors. So thank you, everyone, and please send questions via the chat or the Q and A section. We will be answering those throughout. And I will hand it over to you, Aaron, to start introducing.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much. We are so excited to be here at MarDreamin’. I think we left the ‘g’ off of Dreamin’ just to make us sound cool. So I dig that. So happy to be here with you all. We are excited to talk to you all about email preference centers. And as as is, I think, a a great example, Alice in Wonderland is a good kind of way to to riff on that topic. So, here we are to make that happen. So without further ado, and by the way, I can’t see chat right now because I’m doing full screen, but Steven is going to be keeping an eye on that with me. So if you have questions, as we go, he will be hopping in to do that, and then I will hop in when he takes over with a demo here in a bit.

So in the story in Alice in Wonderland, Alice was just sitting on her riverbank and she was watching as the White Rabbit in a waistcoat, you know, runs by, pulls out his pocket watch, exclaims that he’s going to be late, and then pops right down a rabbit hole. And Alice just wants to know what he’s going to be late for, and so, of course, her curiosity gets the best of her, and she follows him on down that rabbit hole. And, of course, now years later after this story’s publication, going down the rabbit hole has a very specific meaning, which means a bizarre or a difficult state, which happens especially when the pursuit of answers only leads to more questions, more problems, or more pursuits, which is why I think it’s a perfect scenario to talk about digital email preference centers, because it’s one of those topics that can get absolutely insane.

So, this is me and Steven, so I will introduce myself. My name is Aaron Beatty. Hi, everybody. Nice to be here, live and kind of in person. I am the Director of Digital Engagement at Attain Partners. I’ve been in the the email engagement, the specifically Salesforce, ExactTarget, Marketing Cloud, Pardot ecosystem for, I believe, over a decade now. And, I’ve had all the different roles that you can have, I think, within that ecosystem, and it’s been really an incredible and a wild ride. I have done all kinds of other careers. I I used to work in aerospace, working with C-17 aircraft. I used to work in theater for a while, which is really helpful for this kind of stuff. I worked for Nickelodeon, and I know the ingredients to green slime. So, I can’t tell you those ingredients. I can just say there’s a lot of apple sauce and oatmeal, and they have to keep it cold. And that’s why you get the reaction you get from people when you pour it on them. It’s not because it feels bad. It’s because it’s cold. And with that, I will hand it off to Steven Roper, to tell you a little bit about him.

Speaker 2: Thanks, Aaron. Hello, everyone. My name is Steven Roper, and I’m super excited to be here. I’m a Senior Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engineer at Attain Partners. I’ve been working in the Salesforce ecosystem, more specifically in Marketing Cloud, for over seven years now. Been doing a lot of different roles. As I said, right now, I’m a Marketing Cloud engineer, but I’ve also spent a lot of time doing support, done some consulting as well, and just just love working in this space. Prior to this, I worked for Apple. Was a technician there. The title was genius, but that was in title only. And, actually, funny enough, worked with Aaron there and then followed him to Attain Partners because I’m copying his life. So it’s great to be here, and I’ll hand it back to Aaron.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Um, also, quick shout out to my daughter, Piper, who made the trail emojis that you see here. And, I’m I’m bad at that kind of stuff, and she’s really great. And Steven failed to mention he also does music, and so she knew this about him and made him a little true emoji rock star. So, shout out to her. But so happy you all are here, and also happy to the sponsors. As Kara mentioned, none of this happens without some financial support and and things like that. So we’ve got a list of some amazing companies that have been a part of this. I’m looking through this slide here going, oh, yeah. They’re good. Oh, I used their stuff. So great people on this slide. Happy that they have made this happen. And, also, shout out to Marcos because that dude is everywhere and, and, you know, putting up videos, doing all the things. So shout out to him. It’s a it’s a massive undertaking to make this happen.

So, without further ado, so, let me let me stick back with my metaphor here that we’re using and and talk about once upon a time, kind of how this works. These are the things that we need to think through when we’re thinking about an email preference center. And your email preference center might not be in Marketing Cloud, it might be an EPC in Pardot, it might be on another platform altogether, but I think the principles are the same. So those you can always take away. And then, we’re going to go into a little bit more detail on some fun stuff that we like to do when we do get to use the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and specifically Cloud Pages. But we’ll talk about some other options too, some of them that might be provided by some of those sponsors. So this is what we’re going to cover in the next forty five minutes ish or so, and we’ll go from there.

The preference center rabbit hole happens because stakeholders think back to their online experience with them, and most of us have interacted mindlessly with a ton of them, particularly if we are in the industry. And so we and other folks we talk to assume that the finished product, of a simple straightforward preference center is an easy thing that just kind of automatically happens when you set out to build one. So the so to answer, I guess, the question that, quote, unquote, your boss, may ask, which is, isn’t it just a page with some checkboxes on it? I think we all know what’s coming here on the next slide, and that is no. I happen to source this particular no from Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. I tried to do APA, nomenclature on my sourcing. He might not have been talking about email preference centers, but he’s right. It is not an easy thing and that and it’s one of those things that, just like Alice did, can be a really easy thing that lets you go down that rabbit hole where you start kind of peeling the onion of different options and questions and concerns, and it starts to turn into something that seems kind of daunting and over the top. So that’s where we come in. We’re here to start to think through some of these questions and give you some pointers and some guidance on how to kind of frame the discussion. And our goal also is, I think at the end of all this or somewhere, they will you’ll be able to download the, actual slide deck, and at the end of our slide deck is an appendix with some actual code samples that Steven and I put together for some different projects that we’ve worked on. So there’s some actual real takeaways with real actual code that you can take and play with at the end of this.

So these are some of the questions that you need to think through and that can start to make it feel like you’re going down the rabbit hole. So first off there, making changes. Is this a preference center that’s going to be static? Is it something that we’re going to need to update over time? Maybe maybe we have a new interest we want to include. Maybe we have a new preference we want to include. Maybe the name of our newsletter has changed or the description. So is it static, or is it something we need to change? And if we do need to change it, do we need to build the preference center in such a way that the people that need to make those changes have the technical capability to do so? The next one there, systems of record. I hope I hope that systems of record does not have an ‘s’ on it. It should be a system of record, but we also understand sometimes that’s not the case. So especially if we’re talking about Marketing Cloud, perhaps we’re pulling in data from Salesforce, sometimes there are situations where the System of Record for one thing is Marketing Cloud and the System of Record for something else is Salesforce. So something to consider there.

The next one, context detection. That’s a good question, and it’s something that is crucially important. In this email conference, I guarantee there have been lots and lots of conversations about dynamic, personalized, warm messages. And guess what? The preference center is a place where we can do it there as well. So we can know when someone arrives on the page if they are a new subscriber and they need to be greeted to a subscription center or if it’s somebody that is an existing subscriber and they want to change their preferences, or perhaps it’s someone who is unsubscribed and they’re hopefully coming back to reengage with us. So we can speak to those customers differently based on knowing who they are, and that’s something that we can do in a preference center.

I’m going to skip over to one, two, three click unsubscribes. Sounds like a bad song, but what we really are talking about is how bad, how hard, I guess, do we want to make it for a particular customer constituent student, insert your vertical here, a subscriber? How hard is it going to be for them to unsubscribe? I think the gut reaction of many marketers is we don’t want people to unsubscribe, so let’s just make it impossible. I would advise not to do that. If they don’t want your messages, then stop sending them messages and then work on, you know, crafting better messages and reaching out to the right people. But that’s a consideration. By the way, my preference is two clicks. One click to get to the page, another click to confirm that you actually want to take the action.

Multiple business units. This applies to both Pardot and Marketing Cloud with, if you’ve got multiple different business units or brands perhaps or geographies, can they share a preference center? Does that preference center need to speak to the other business units? How does that data move back and forth between them? And for a subscriber, do they need to be able to easily move from one to the next? So there’s and and does their data travel with them, I guess? So those are all considerations.

The next one is, I think, a really big one and a hard one, which is how many preferences can we put on the preference center. And I love it when we work with clients that go, yeah. You know, we’ve got these three or four newsletters and, you know, we’ve got a few interests we want to ask, and then that should do us. And we go, yes. That is exactly what it should look like. And then we have other clients that go, well, we’ve got these 10 different businesses. Each business wants to make sure that their full list of preferences is on there because they have 55 different newsletters. Each of these different businesses has that. So we need to make sure that when the subscriber arrives on this page that they can opt into or out of anything at all. Bad idea. I’d say, like, ideally, no more than 10 preferences if you can do it.

The next one, profile versus preference. Profile tends to be more bio demo stuff, first name, last name, address, email address, maybe. That kind of stuff is profile. Preferences, What do we, what do we actually allow them to opt in or out of? And sometimes there’s some questions there around, you know, if we’re doing fundraising, for example, is that a thing that we want to allow people to opt into or out of easily? Like, who’s going to opt in for fundraising messages?

Dynamic versus static. So we already talked about context detection, but the other part of that is making the page itself actually read in real time whatever we have available for it to use to show as preferences. So that would mean that not only can the team make changes easily, but that the website then updates effectively in real time every single time it loads. So lots of things to think about. This is where the rabbit hole begins.

Now what I like to do and what our team does as a methodology is something that works, you know, not just when you’re in a, like, a partner client relationship, but it also works if you are working in house for a team and you have been tasked with building a new preference center. The same idea works. And the first step is to make sure you know what your scope is and make sure you know that you have the people in the room that that are going to be the decision makers and the stakeholders and that you can get buy in. Gotta have all the different stakeholders present in order to make sure that, that you’ve got everyone involved because the worst thing you’d want is to to finish up your preference center project and then have an unknown stakeholder show up that has power, and they go, oh, you forgot X, Y, Z, and now you got to go back to the drawing board. So first and foremost, scope and buy in.

The next one, we’ve got the little, uh, kiss, uh, emoji, I’m going to call it, graphic, and that is short. Of course, I’ll use the nice version, keep it stupid simple. And so crucially important when you’re talking about really any of these issues is to keep at least the customer facing part simple. You don’t want to present them with a million different options. So anything you can do to simplify that experience, bring it down, and not make it overwhelming, even if there’s some complexity behind the scenes, that’s okay, and as long as you build for that, you’re good to go. But at least on the surface from the end user perspective, keep it simple.

Then, I think it’s good in any situation, and we’ll do this today, talk through best practices with preference centers, show what it looks like when it’s well done, and then partly because it’s important and partly because it’s kind of fun, show what to avoid as well. And so we will do that during this presentation today.

So starting off with some things, you know, we we don’t have a scope of work to walk through so we’re going to kind of gloss over that and say that’s something you should do. But here’s a great example of a site that I think does it well. This is an example from Wistia, and it’s kind of playful and fun. It matches their brand. How much Wistia do you want in your life? Pick and choose what you’d like to receive. They have a very nice select all, select none button there at the top. Right now, neither of those are darkened or selected, so it’s clear what will happen if I choose one of those options. And, also, they only have a few options here. Um, they have, what, five, options? And each option I think I get to zoom in here. I do. Each option here has a little checkbox, the name of it, kind of a bonus there, roughly how many I’m going to get every month. I don’t think that’s required, but that’s a very nice to have thing. And then the description underneath. That’s everything you need. It’s very clear how it works. When it’s checked, you get it. When it’s not checked, you don’t. So I’m going to give them a giant thumbs up emoji on that one. Very well done. I love everything about it. Really, nothing I would change.

Now here’s another example from Spotify that I think is also very well done. They do have some more options here, but it’s really just for the, I’m counting in my head, seven, different preferences that they’re presenting. But because they have both email and push, really, it’s 14. But, again, using the checkboxes, old school, simple, everybody gets it. I can tell at a glance what I’m opted into and what I’m not. If it’s checked, I’m getting it. If it’s not checked, I’m not getting it. When I pull this page up, it reflects the current state of my situation. It doesn’t show up blank, and I get to pick and choose. It doesn’t show up completely filled out, and I have to deselect. It reflects the current state, which is perfect. The only niggle I would have on how they’ve got it set up is that they are using the little icons, and then it says push. I suspect and I think, actually so I my mom, I think, is here with us. And so if she can hop into chat and tell us, which I can’t see, so somebody will have to tell me. But I wonder, if there are some folks that might not know what it means, to turn that checkbox on or off for push. And so, I’m really curious if, she’s here and if she’s responding. But, that’s something to consider is that, you know, as email marketers, we all know exactly what that is. We know what’s going to happen. Not everybody in the audience does this every day for a living, and they might need a little bit more explanation. So, Steven or somebody that has a mic will have to hop in and tell me if if she has, provided her insight on that because now I’m super curious, but we’ll move on. At any rate, really good stuff here. Really great detail, really clean. I’m a big fan. Overall, giant thumbs up.

Here’s another thing that goes along with the preference center, and that is an email that is measuring progress toward filling out your preferences or filling out your profile. And so for this particular one, it’s for a job site, and they are sending an email saying people that fill out this information are more likely to get jobs and that one of our requirements is that you have at least an 80% complete profile. And so this is a really great thing to do. You can do this pretty much across any vertical. Just let people know, hey. We’ve got a new preference center. We have new interests. Let us know what you think. Fill out your interests, and we’ll get you even more personalized messages. So, it’s a good idea to have something to support the launch of a preference center. The only thing I would say would be even cooler on this, which you could absolutely do, in Marketing Cloud for sure, and I’m sure other platforms, would be to make this dynamic and say, hey, smiles. You know, this is great, but, also, you’re only 73% complete. And if you fill out one more thing, then you’ll be at 80%. And then this little graphic could show their actual progress, and maybe even if you’ve got it, other, you know, their favorite whatever that you have on file. So you could make it feel like it’s for smiles in this case. So, overall, gold star for these folks. It’s, it’s extra credit. It’s really well done. I’m a big fan.

So moving on now. The things to avoid. So here is a, an example of a preference center, that I got from andrewbeaston.com. This is not his preference center, but he was showcasing some, preferences that were questionable. And so if you look at this one, at first glance, it doesn’t look terrible. We just have a lot of text fields to fill out and few radio buttons and a few checkboxes. But then when you start to actually look at the fields, email address, that’s fine. First name, last name, okay. Then we have untitled with first, second, and third choice radio buttons. Then we have untitled as a text field. Then we’ve got last name again. I don’t know if those fields are related. We’ve got birthday twice just as a text field. Then we have a checkbox for HR and a checkbox for racks. Now I don’t know what this company sells or does, but I can tell you if I show up on this website, you better believe I’m going to start checking some of these boxes just to see what happens. I’m going to add myself to that HR checkbox. I want to see what HR is sending out. I don’t know what Racks is, but now I want to know. And so I’m going to opt into that too. And I’m probably going to put two different birthdays in, in that text field, maybe not even dates, just random characters and numbers. At any rate, there’s people like me that have been on the Internet for far too long and just kind of like to troll and mess with stuff, but particularly when it comes to, weird preference centers. So that’s what’s happening here. What I what I believe happened is that they are in a situation with their CRM or their whatever is public facing for this site, and when they launched their preference center, it was set up just the way they wanted it, they were happy with it, they kind of washed their hands of it, and they went on their way. And then over time, other people, maybe even the same person, got involved with their CRM and found other fields that could be marked as public. And they went, I I think this should be public. And so they mark it public. And then what happens, it shows up automatically on the preference center as untitled with first, second, and third choice. So something to be aware of, if you’re in an environment, and, actually, the out of the box preference center for Marketing Cloud is that type of environment where you can make a list or a publication list public, and that name and that description all gets put right up on the out of the box preference center. Same for any field attributes that you mark as public. So you just have to be very aware of that and ends up being a training and kind of a business methodology step just to make sure that everybody is aware of the power of the public checkbox, if you have an out of the box preference center or something else that talks directly to it. And so that’s one side of it. And then the other side is if you’re the owner of this thing, you’ve just got to check-in on it every so often. So, I know our team, when we build out preference centers, we’re usually signing up for all of the emails, and so we get emails and can’t help but just check every so often and make sure that it still is working, as we expect it to. And if you’re an internal team, then it’s probably a good idea to just set a calendar reminder or a repeating task, that just reminds you to check-in on it every so often. It’s just a good best practice. In the meantime, I hope you all will join me in subscribing to HR and Racks. But overall, thumbs down on that one. It could be so much better, and there you go.

Now this one. I love this one. It’s another example of something to avoid, and I love it because when you look at it, it looks totally fine. It it’s got yes, no, opt outs, opt out of all emails. Great. Everything makes sense there. But the the challenge is is for somebody who has I’m going to keep bringing my mom up because she’s here. Someone who had an English teacher as a mother. I’m looking at this, and I’m going, okay. The email is send advice email. Great. Yes. I want that. So send advice email. Yes. But wait. That’s the opt out. So yes. Opt out to send advice email, and now I don’t know where I live anymore. So that is really confusing. The No/Yes slider, I do not like. That’s why I’m a big fan of using checkboxes everywhere always. People understand it. It always has a set meaning. And, the other thing too that I’ve seen is the sliders that aren’t labeled, where it’s just it looks like a physical like, your ring switch on your phone where you’re switching it on and off. And I’ve seen a variety of those that, use two different colors where they are nice enough to use colors that are hard for somebody like me who’s colorblind to tell when that switch is actually on and off. So for that and a whole host of other reasons, I advise to stay away from the check boxes, stay away from the confusing double negative language, and go from there. So another thumbs down.

So all that to say, you’ve got the scope, you’ve got buy in from the team, you’re advising them please please to keep it simple, and then you’ve shown them what works and what doesn’t work, and now it’s to find a solution. Right? So this is the Marketing Cloud out of the box Profile Center / Subscription Center. It has pros and cons as I mentioned before, but, hey, it’s built in, not very customizable. You can add your logo. You can make other lists and and, publication lists, visible or not. You can change the descriptions of them and all that kind of stuff. It is a little confusing in how it works, especially if you’re using data extensions because if you opt in to the publication list that’s affiliated with the data extension, you’re not really opting in to that mailing list. You’re just opting in to the publication list, which is not the same thing. So there’s some weird nuance with this. It’s very simple, but it’s built into your license. So, you know, there you go. It’s an option. It’s it’s a way to kind of get started and and test the waters.

AppExchange. If we’re talking about Salesforce, AppExchange has a variety of options available. There’s, the No-Code Preference Center. I believe the way that they work and, reach out to them for all the details. But, generally, there’s a setup charge, and then usually there’s some kind of, like, hosting charge based on the number of records. So there’s kind of an ongoing there’s a setup and then there’s kind of an ongoing licensing fee. This actually, this example that’s from this does have the two colored slider that’s for somebody like me. I can’t tell you which one is on and off, but I’m sure they have other options. So, anyway, this is one of several options, that’s available out in the marketplace, and it’s a little more, you know, you don’t have to code or anything.

This one is from Digio. This is a they’re a a WYSIWYG based design solution. I don’t believe they host data, so their structure would be like a setup charge and then, like, an ongoing licensing fee. Again, it’s going to be pretty straightforward for a marketer to set up. Choose the list that you want. In this example, they have kind of a nice graphic to show the, the plant that’s kind of wilting as you add or remove things, which is kind of a fun touch, but you can make it match your brand, which is nice. So, this one is, Digio. I don’t know if I actually said the name.

Here’s you know, we are a a Salesforce Marketing Cloud partner, so we do Pardot and and Marketing Cloud. So we love the Cloud Page solution because with that, we can use kind of our our our built out solutions to make it do exactly what we want it to do. So this is a custom solution. You can make it do whatever you want, basically. It’s hosted directly from within Marketing Cloud, which is cool. But, also, I think I get to on the next slide, you can frame that into other places. So there’s some cool stuff you can do with it. So here in a bit, hopefully, I’ve left time for Steven to get a word in edgewise and go through, a very light example of how it works in Marketing Cloud, but but this is the solution that we’ll walk you through, here in a moment. And, also, this is the solution that some of the code snippets in the appendix when you download the full slideshow, that’s what those, code snippets are pertaining to. So with this, the custom solution would require, you know, either in house or paying a a partner to build out a solution. So there’s time and effort involved there, but there’s no real ongoing licensing cost beyond just your regular, you know, Marketing Cloud, licensing that you’ve already set up.

So, on this front, some things to consider here. I love the idea of making the page context aware, and we’ve had some success in that. Just identifying the elements on the page that can or should change based on when you know who they are. So, for example, is it a subscription center, or is it a preference center? Those could be two different names for roughly the same thing based on the audience. But I think that’s huge. That’s what makes the page feel personalized for someone. And then I mentioned it briefly, but another thing that can be on that context aware, is only displaying certain options based on how the subscriber arrived on your page. So I mentioned briefly the fundraising example or donation example. Maybe we don’t want to have the donation option there as something people can opt in or out of generally, but if somebody has just clicked on an email that was in that category of email, it was a fundraising email, and then they go to the preference center, then maybe I want to go ahead and display the option for them to opt out at that time. And then maybe that will provide them with a more granular option versus just getting rid of all of it. So those are all things that you can do.

Something else to consider, PII (Personally Identifiable Information). So, in some of our last projects, Steven and I have had some conversations around, you know, based on the context of how and when somebody arrives on your page, and since we generally have a good deal of information about that person by that point, particularly if they arrived from an email, or even if they’ve just provided us an email address, we could display all kinds of stuff on the page for them to update and change. But based on how they’ve arrived on that page, we need to consider what information should actually be displayed. An example would be a subscriber who clicks on the the preference center link at the bottom of their email, takes them directly to the page. At that at that point, there’s a query string that’s encoded that the web page has deciphered, and so we have a pretty good idea that, at least somebody has access to that email, and can log in. And they’re a little bit more you know, they’re not fully authenticated, but it’s a pretty good guess that the right person is there. So we might display a little bit more information in that case versus a preference center that just in the parameters of the URL, you can change the email address, and that’s what the website is looking at to pull in the information from the subscriber. Now in that case, a bot, anybody can just change the email address and the URL string, and so we probably wouldn’t want to make much information available at all. Maybe their their current opt in or out, preferences, but beyond that, probably nothing else. We wouldn’t want to show, their ZIP code or their first name or their address or their blood type and social security number. We don’t want any of that stuff on there. We don’t want that stuff in there anyway, but just throwing it out there.

The next one, iframe or AJAX, or direct to cloud page. So when you build it out as a cloud page, you have the option of of just, kind of mimicking the look and feel of whatever the standard website is and just building that out within the page. And so when somebody arrives on the page, even if the domain isn’t exactly the same, you know, they’ll they’ll probably trust that it’s safe and that, that it matches the brand and everything, and and they’re good to go. But you also can iframe that page into the actual website of the brand, or AJAX it in. And in either one of those situations, that means that whoever your web team is that’s doing your web design, can control it. So they can if they have, let’s say, Google Tag Manager, they have, control over, you know, what looks right in the headers and footers, and maybe there’s a brand redesign, then it’s always going to be up to date because they can control it just like they control every other page in the site, versus if that page is only as a cloud page and you’re sending subscribers there and maybe if you’ve mimicked the look and feel, now anytime there’s a change to your header and footer, then either the web team or the email team has to remember that there’s this kind of orphaned page out there that we don’t want to ignore because then the branding and everything can get off from the, you know, the proper website domain. So something to consider there. A little bit more time and effort to to build it into the page, but, but it’s a cool option.

The next one, hard coded versus dynamically loaded. Obviously, a difference in level of effort there, but, it’s just a difference between whether or not there is, you know, it may be an object in Salesforce that has all of the preferences, has the name of the preference, has the description, has maybe the order that they should be displayed, has whether they’re currently active or not. So all that information can be stored in, like, a Salesforce object, or it can be stored as a, as a Marketing Cloud Data Extension. And then the users that have access to those systems can make changes there, and then they can be reflected on the preference center, or it can just be hard coded directly into the HTML.

And then the last one there to consider, as I mentioned way long ago when I was talking about system or systems of record, there are situations where you need to update data, related to a subscriber both in Marketing Cloud and in Salesforce CRM or directly in one system or the other. And the nice thing about a cloud page is that it has API capability to do either or, including some really, sophisticated things behind the scenes. Like, someone takes an action, and they are a high value donor, and so we want to create a case behind the scenes when they unsubscribe or when they change their email address or whatever. So there’s a lot of things that can happen when they click that submit button beyond just updating their preferences.

So lots of fun things to talk about. And now, Steven, I’m going to take a break, and I’m going to take a breath. And I’m going to figure out how to stop sharing because up next is time for you to take the spotlight here and start walking us through, the demo. So, this is me currently navigating how to turn off my screen share.

Speaker 2: You’re doing great.

Speaker 1: Um, and I still don’t know how to do that.

Speaker 2: I want to say it’s in the on the presenting page next to the camera at the bottom.

Speaker 1: I wonder if anyone Kara, can you help me?

Speaker 0: Yep. That’s why I just switched over here. Under the Leave Stage, there should be a little box between the camera and the settings.

Speaker 1: Mhm. It has the I have a pointer with a little no sign on it.

Speaker 0: Fabulous.

Speaker 1: I mean, Steven, I don’t want to cut your piece out entirely, but, um, yeah. I mean, you know. I mean so, I mean, worst case, I can hop in. Sure. Yeah. And Not a problem. The Vanna White to your You can…

Speaker 2: Do that. Here, I’ve got if you want, I can send you a URL.

Speaker 1: This is how you know it’s live, everybody.

Speaker 2: We’re doing it live.

Speaker 1: Uh, because we would have edited this out in post.

Speaker 2: Also, your mom is here.

Speaker 1: Oh, yay. Hi, mom.

Speaker 0: Mom is here.

Speaker 1: Yes. So what did she say about the push thing?

Speaker 2: She doesn’t know. I pinned her, comment, though.

Speaker 1: She said she didn’t know what that meant?

Speaker 2: Not sure.

Speaker 1: Okay. I’m sorry to call you out like that, mom.

Speaker 2: Uh, I dropped it. Sorry. I dropped it in the speaker’s chat.

Speaker 1: Okay. I am, I am almost, into, is it in your business unit in the demo account?

Speaker 2: It is.

Speaker 1: Okay. Cool. Um, alright. So now the question is, what if I want to share something other than what I have been sharing? I don’t even know that I can do that. Oh, stop sharing. Found it. Okay. You’re up.

Speaker 2: Alright.

Speaker 1: It’s above it’s above the Leave Stage button, and it’s white and, um, you know, UI design. Okay.

Speaker 0: Thank you. I’ll do that for my next session. Thank you for being my guest.

Speaker 1: Sure. Sorry, everybody.

Speaker 2: Alright. So can you all see my screen? It should be just a Google search at the moment. I don’t know, Aaron, if you can see that.

Speaker 1: Yes. We can see, uh, uh, the Google.

Speaker 2: Perfect. So, I’m going to quickly jump into an example preference center that we stood up in preparation for this presentation. Let me first say that I am not a graphic designer or UI developer, which will quickly become obvious. I was never very good at arts and crafts. I always use too much glue. But, anyway alright.

So here we go. What I first want to say is, looking at this preference center, you know, what we want is for the functionality, to be context specific. And what we’re seeing here so let me just run through this very quickly. At the very top, we’ve just got that it’s an email preference center and a greeting here. It says we’re committed to honoring your preference to best serve you. We’ve got interests and subscriptions that we can check and subscribe to if you’d like. And at the very bottom, we have, text boxes for information about first name and email. Now this page is blank, just coming to it like this, and that’s because it hasn’t captured any information about me yet. Or if it has, it’s not making it known. So, what we want to do is is get a subscriber to the preference center, using what I like to use is an AMPscript function that’s called the CloudPagesURL function, which passes an encrypted attribute to a destination page, and that ensures that the page is directly tied to the subscriber that clicks on the link, which is not only important for security, but it also allows for a custom and context specific user experience.

So let’s see what that would look like. Just refresh this. So just imagine that I received an email with a preference center link, and I clicked on that. And it brought me to the page. It’s the same page, but we can see now that it’s it’s contextualized. At the top here, it says, greeting, Steven. We’re committed to honoring your email preferences. We can see that I have checkboxes already selected. It knows what I’m I’m currently subscribed to with interests and subscriptions, and it also shows my information here down at the bottom. And this information is being directly pulled in from the master data extension for this account. If I jump over to data extensions within Marketing Cloud and I look at the master data extension and look at the records, we can see my subscriber key at the top here and email address, and my first name is being pulled in. And then my interests are either true or false depending on what I have selected.

If I go back to the preference center, now let’s say I want to make a change. Let’s say that I want to sign up for Attain News. And let’s say that, you know, my name is Steven, but it’s it’s it’s not spelled properly. I want to add a p h, so let’s go ahead and do that. Change it to Steven. Yep. Update those preferences, which will bring me here to a confirmation page. And this just tells me that, thanks. Your preferences have been updated, and it allows me to return to the email preference center. This is important, I think, because, you know, being able to quickly return to the email preference center, if you accidentally unsubscribe or made a change you didn’t mean to, you can quickly jump back. Also using that CloudPagesURL function allows you to maintain that context, and that that specific information about that subscriber. It’s able to follow that subscriber, which I think we can all agree is pretty rad.

So let me click on that and come back to the page. And now it tells me, greetings, Steven. We’re committed to honoring your email preferences. Shows that I have made some changes here as well. Um, and then let’s go ahead and and try to unsubscribe from this, and I’ll change my name to S T E P H E N because I’m not a monster and update those preferences.

Speaker 1: I will add it’s surprisingly difficult in Cloud Pages to make it so that when you click the unsubscribe button that it that it unchecks all the other all the other boxes.

Speaker 2: That’s right. Yeah. Most definitely. Um, and then we’ll it says here, we’re sorry to see you go. So, again, context specific and knows that I’ve unsubscribed. We’re going to return to the email preference center, and tells it tells me that it missed me. Um, so okay. Well, I’ll go ahead and sign back up again. I’ll resubscribe to a few things, and I’ll check Arts because maybe I could use some help with, designing things like this page. I promise the page is beautiful on the inside. Um, and go ahead and update preferences one more time. It says welcome back. Preferences have been updated. We’ll return to the preference center. And once again, it shows all of the interests and subscriptions I subscribed to. And, I’ll jump back to the master data extension just to see those changes reflected. And we can see now first name is spelled correctly. If you can see this, it’s probably really small. And the interests that I have signed up for are are correctly reflected. Yep. If if I I don’t know if I have a couple more minutes to show how this is running on the back end. If I don’t, maybe we could go to questions.

Speaker 1: We have two and a half minutes. Okay.

Speaker 0: And this will boot us out. So if we are booted, I want to say thank you to everyone for attending. This was an excellent session. Thank you, Aaron and Steven. And now I’m going to let you go. Perfect.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Let’s, let’s let’s, take just a, just a couple of, minutes. If maybe we have time for maybe one question or anything, maybe we can tackle that. Otherwise, we can just say thanks for joining us. So we’ll we’ll wait here a second, see if anybody has a burning question.

Speaker 2: Yep. While we’re waiting, um, one cool thing about that preference center is it is dynamically loaded. At least the interests and the preferences are dynamically loaded via a Data Extension. So a client doesn’t have to go in and edit the code at all, which they probably don’t want to, and we probably don’t want them to edit the code. So it’s a lot easier for them to just go in and update a Data Extension with new publications, and those will automatically appear on the preference center, which is, again, I think we can all agree, pretty rad.

Speaker 1: And it looks like we do have a question about the format and everything, which is how do we get the slides because I’ve referenced them a few times.

Speaker 0: We will be sending the slides and the recording post conference to everybody.

Speaker 1: Perfect. There you go. Alright. Well, I’d say let’s wrap it. If it’s going to boot us out, we got a minute left. I really enjoy these and getting to chat with people. I’m disappointed that I had to go full screen, so that I couldn’t see all the chat, and really just spend time trying to chat with my mom while I’m trying to do the presentation. But, so thank you everybody for being here, including my mom and anybody else. So much fun. Hopefully, you picked up some cool stuff. I and in the slide deck is our email addresses and everything, and I’m all over LinkedIn as well. So if you have questions, feel free to to to follow me or to reach out, and we’ll be happy to see how we can help. So, it’s been great. Steven, any any final final last words in the last thirty seconds?

Speaker 2: Appreciate you all for being here. Thanks for checking it out. Thanks to Aaron’s mom specifically. And…

Speaker 1: What’d you say about my mom? No. Woah. Um, awesome. Well, this is great, you guys. Appreciate it. Um, keep on MarDreamin’, everybody. Yeah. And, we’ll see you later.

Speaker 0: Thanks, Tom.

Speaker 2: Thanks.