Letting contacts choose how often they hear from you in Eloqua

How Eloqua subscription management works

Eloqua’s subscription management has three layers.

• Email groups work like distribution lists. You set them up by product, region, brand or type of email, such as newsletters, events and product updates. A contact’s membership decides whether they are eligible for that group’s email. An email group also carries defaults for its emails, such as the header, the footer and the landing pages contacts see when they subscribe or unsubscribe.
• The Subscription Management Page is a system page where contacts join or leave any email group set to appear on it or tick a box to unsubscribe from all email. You edit its text and styling under Assets > Email Setup > Email Groups. Changes a contact makes take effect immediately.
• Global unsubscribe stops all future email to a contact apart from email you deliberately send to unsubscribed contacts. Eloqua keeps the status even if the contact record is deleted so it still applies if the contact comes back into the database.

The master exclude list sits above all three: its settings override a contact’s own subscription choices.

Mailbox providers add another way to unsubscribe. Eloqua can include a List-Unsubscribe header in campaign emails, which mailbox providers such as Gmail and Yahoo use for their own one-click unsubscribe button. By default it unsubscribes the contact from the email’s group. Since the 25D release admins can switch it to a global unsubscribe on the email defaults page.

Oracle also recommends an intermediate unsubscribe page which asks contacts to confirm before they are unsubscribed so that email scanning tools that follow every link don’t unsubscribe people by accident.

What subscriptions can’t express

Email groups record which kinds of email a contact wants. They say nothing about how much. A contact subscribed to five groups gets everything all five send, however busy the week.

So when volume is the problem a contact has two choices: leave a group they still care about or unsubscribe from everything. Either way you lose them for email they would have read at a lower frequency and a global unsubscribe stays in place until the contact opts back in themselves.

One-click unsubscribe makes the problem worse. A contact who uses the inbox’s unsubscribe button never sees your pages so the alternative has to be visible in the email itself: a “Get fewer emails” link beside the unsubscribe link in the footer.

Adding a frequency choice

Choose the tiers

Offer two or three tiers that you can honor, for example:

• Everything we send, held to your standard cap.
• At most one email a week.
• Monthly highlights only.

Every campaign has to respect each tier you offer so don’t offer more tiers than you can enforce.

Store the choice

Create a picklist contact field, such as Email Frequency Preference, with one value for each tier. A contact field is easy to use in segments, shared filters and Compare Contact Fields decision steps. If you also need a history of changes, write each submission to a custom object.

Build the preference page

Build a landing page with a form that shows the frequency choice alongside the email groups. The form needs three processing steps:

• Update Contacts - With Form Data saves the frequency choice to the contact field.
• Email Group - Subscribe/Unsubscribe updates each group taking the action from a form field.
• Unsubscribe Contacts Globally runs only when the contact ticks unsubscribe from all, using the step’s option to specify when it runs.

Step names differ slightly in the Redwood experience. Link the page from the footer of every email as “Manage preferences” with “Get fewer emails” as its own link beside it. The intermediate unsubscribe page is a good place to offer it too.

Honoring the choice

The lightest tier: a digest email group

“Monthly highlights only” is the easiest tier to honor because email groups alone can enforce it. Create a Monthly Highlights email group. When a contact chooses that tier the form subscribes them to it and unsubscribes them from the other groups. Only campaigns that send to the highlights group reach them. No campaign needs an extra check as long as every marketing email belongs to an email group: an email outside any group still reaches them.

Capped tiers: a frequency check

“At most one email a week” has to be counted, which takes the same logic as a frequency cap: a shared filter of contacts who chose the weekly tier and have been sent an email in the last seven days, checked before every email. If you already run a native cap, add the tier to the same shared filter so one decision step checks both: contacts on the weekly tier who have had their one email and anyone else who has reached your standard limit.

The tier has the same weaknesses as the cap. Every campaign needs the check and campaigns that reach the contact at the same moment can all pass it. The contact’s one email a week also goes to whichever campaign gets there first whether or not it is the one that matters more.

With the Email Governor

The Email Governor lets you set tighter limits for the segments that need them so each frequency tier can become a segment with its own limit: one email a week for the weekly tier and your standard limit for everyone else. Every governed campaign draws on the same count so the limit holds however many campaigns run at once. Because each campaign has a priority, a contact who allowed one email this week gets the most important one and the rest wait in the queue until the contact has room under their limit again.

Measuring whether it works

Compare three things in Insight before and after you launch the frequency choice:

• Unsubscribe rates, both global and by email group.
• How many contacts choose each tier and how many choose a lighter tier instead of unsubscribing.
• Engagement by tier including Fatigue Level if Fatigue Analysis is turned on.

If the choice is working, some of the contacts who would have unsubscribed pick a lighter tier instead and keep opening the email they still get.