Aug 15, 2011

Update Your Subscription Preferences Via Forms

Previously, when your subscribers wanted to update their subscription preferences (like changing their interest groups or their preferred email format) the only way to do that was by clicking a link in one of your email campaigns. We’ve made things much simpler, and now your subscribers can update their preferences from your subscribe form location just by entering their email address.

already subscribed

If they’re already on the list, we’ll send them an email with a link to update their subscription preferences. Clicking the “update your preferences” link in the email will then take the subscriber to a web-based version of your signup form with their current values pre-filled. The subscriber can then make and submit their changes.

update preferences email link

This should be especially helpful for those of you who rely heavily on interest groups for list segmentation.

Posted By

Amanda

Tagged

Discussion

  • BM

    Does this mean you’re going to send such information to every single person on my list? Well, in my case this would mean no value at all. That’s why I don’t like the idea of such an extra messages. What can I do?

    08.15.2011

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    • Amanda

      We won’t send anything out to your list. Your subscriber will only see the option to update their preferences if they go to your signup form, enter their email address and are already on your list.

      08.15.2011

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  • Sandi

    If I’m going to be sending out a note to my list to ask them to update their preferences, what merge tag should I use? Any help you can provide to tactically execute this new feature would be appreciated. Thanks!

    08.16.2011

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    • Ben

      *|PROFILE|*

      Tactical advice? If you’re looking to collect and backfill additional info, like FNAME or JOB_TITLE, offer a free prize to anybody that has that data filled in on x date of drawing.

      08.16.2011

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      • Sandi

        Thanks, Ben! I was all set to use *|UPDATE_PROFILE|*. Appreciate the help.

        08.16.2011

      • Ben

        Oops, I think I need to brush up on my merge tags. It actually is UPDATE_PROFILE. Sorry about that!

        08.17.2011

  • Jodie

    That’s all well and good but if you don’t email Me to tell me someone on my list has changed their details it’s a wast of time. I will have old info on my master, desktop list.
    An email to tell the list owner of updates has been on the Wish Lists for quite a while now… Still waiting. (Because of this I don’t use the MC sign up form.)

    I have recently come across another situation where MC won’t even update info on a Role based email subscriber whom I have been mailing to for over a year. I Auto updated the Town and it would not take the information Because it was Role based… So now MC has old info…. It get’s very messy.

    08.16.2011

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  • Catherine

    Excellent improvement! One question related to subscriber preferences: any hope of adding a feature whereby a subscriber can ‘pause’ his subscriptions or alter the frequency of emails he receives? So far it seems that subscriptions are binary–you’re in or out–but I think we’d have a lot fewer unsubscribes if the subscriber could pick a middle ground and be emailed less frequently. Thanks MC! Eep eep!

    08.17.2011

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  • Kelly

    This is a most user unfriendly approach. Why can’t Group subscription preferences be shown in the *|update_profile|* merge tag?

    08.31.2011

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  • Artsoft Solutions

    Hi. i cant make it work. When i login using facebook account or twitter it doesnt replace my form that im already login. But i try on this blog to login and its working properly but i cant make it work in my blog. Can someone help me.. thanks

    06.20.2012

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  • Bern

    Is there any way the form can be tweaked to remove the suggestion of an error if a valued subscriber uses a signup form to subscribe to something extra? This isn’t an error – it’s a good thing! I’m tempted to switch to Aweber because it handles this stuff much more gracefuly…

    11.17.2012

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    • John

      Hi Bern, I’d like to look into this with our UX team, but could you explain the issue you’re experiencing in a little more detail? I’m not entirely sure I’m following the process you’re describing. Thanks.

      11.19.2012

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      • Jill

        I’m also interested in what Bern was inquiring about.

        I am using the “subscription confirmed” page as a repository of documents and I want to have multiple squeeze/landing pages encourage people to sign up to the same list and land on the same confirmation page.

        When I have a new document come out I want to make a squeeze/landing page and when people ALREADY on the list put in their email address to sign up and get the document, since they’re already on the list as it stands they get an error message telling them they’re already on the list. What Bern and I would like is for the form to boot them to the Subscription Confirmed page as configured for that list if they’re already signed up.

        I just got going on MailChimp for our karate club and this is a big sticking point. I’m thinking of switching over to AWeber before people get too used to MailChimp for this one feature alone, since I plan to have a variety of PDFs available for download, all behind their own “sign up for our email list” squeeze/landing pages.

        Love your system and prefer it over Aweber otherwise so I hope this change can be made so I can stay put and set up other clients on your service!

        Jill Lampi
        WebGrrl Enterprises
        Black belt @ Charleswood Karate in Winnipeg Canada

        12.29.2012

      • John

        Hi Jill, I’ve gone over this several times to make sure I’m understanding the process you’re trying to accomplish. Multiple lists would probably be the best solution in this case, but if that’s out of the question I have a few other thoughts for you. One option if you are comfortable with it or work with someone who is skilled in these things would be the API. While I don’t have a step-by-step, I believe you might be able to get close to the functionality you’re wanting. The other thought that I had was regarding autoresponders. If you were to send the news of the new content to your existing subscribers you could use some of our new autoresponder triggers to automatically send that new content on their request. All that being said, I do appreciate the feedback and I’m going to pass this along to our dev team for their review as well. Thanks.

        01.06.2013

      • Jill

        Thank you so much for the response!

        The short version of what we want is this:

        User fills in subscribe form, but user is already subscribed! Instead of giving an error, boot the user to the final confirmation page that users get when they sign up and click the opt in, in their email afterwards. I can give a site that has great examples but don’t want to post URLs here without permission.

        Then we can use the final confirmation page to hold all of the links to our documents, no matter what page or form visitors signed up to our one list from.

        The problem with mailing out to existing users about new documents is that future users will also want that document and I don’t want to clog up my email/autoresponder list with spam about all the other documents people can already find on our site if they’re looking for it.

        01.07.2013

  • Daphne Delay

    I need help. I occasionally have a single subscriber email me and give me their new email address. I have a Preference form created (just like you show in this blog) but I can’t figure out how to send this form to just one subscriber. On the form-creater, there’s an option to “share” but it is for the website (html) or social networks.

    Can someone advise me please? (and thanks in advance!)

    06.04.2013

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    • John

      Hi Daphne, There’s probably a few ways to help with this. If you were to add an Update Profile merge tag to all of your campaigns, there’d be a link for your subscribers to make those changes every time they receive an email. However, in the case where a subscriber emails you directly about updating an email, you’d need to email the update to their old address which they may or may not have access to. Instead, you could just do a search in your account for their old email address and quickly update it in the Edit Subscriber Profile area.

      06.05.2013

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