With GDPR now in force, we wanted to flag a few important considerations you should make when linking these contact preferences to dotdigital.
About linking contact preferences to dotdigital
If you’re not familiar, when you create contact preferences in the Settings interface, it’s possible to link them to dotdigital. This then powers additional functionality, such as the online Sign-Up form and means that when customers unsubscribe from an integrated email, the assigned email preference is also removed in Spektrix. Note that although unsubscribing removes the related contact preference in Spektrix, in dotdigital, the customer is also suppressed from any further communications with you, regardless of the preference you are segmenting on.
If you’re linking multiple contact preferences to dotdigital, these will work in exactly the same way as we’ve described above. For example, if you have two preferences connected to dotdigital, when a customer submits their details in the online sign-up form, both preferences will be set to ‘yes’ in your database. It may be the case that your online sign-up form suggests that they’re only signing up for a marketing newsletter, even though behind the scenes, the customer is opting into other mailing lists too.
Recommendations
Here are some recommendations to make sure your preferences are tracked correctly and that customers are always aware of what communications they’re signing up for online. We recommend that you link only one contact preference with dotdigital (your main email communication contact preference) in conjunction with taking the below steps:
- Set up a dotdigital building block in your email template that you can use in all of your email communications. This could show a link to your ‘My Account’ page, and instruct customers to use this link to update their preferences. For example, “Click the link above to update your contact preferences”.
- All dotdigital campaigns must have an unsubscribe link, but this can be placed anywhere in your email. We suggest creating additional messaging to go with the unsubscribe link, instructing customers that, “If you would like unsubscribe from all email communications from this organisation, please click here”.
- This should make it clear to the customer that they have the ability to amend their own preferences or opt out of all email communication by unsubscribing if they choose.
If you intend to link more than one contact preference and are using the sign-up form on your website, it’s best practice to explain to the customer exactly which preferences they are signing up to by adding messaging to the form.
Your web developer can design a custom sign-up form that makes different contact preference options visible to the customer. This requires additional work and integration with the Spektrix API. Contact a member of the Support team if you’d like to know more about this.