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Every marketing email includes two links in its footer: Manage preferences and Unsubscribe. Both open hosted pages. You don’t need to build anything.
  • Manage preferences opens the preference centre. There the recipient ticks the lists they want to stay on, or unsubscribes from all emails.
  • Unsubscribe opens a confirmation page. Email clients that support one-click unsubscribe can also unsubscribe the recipient directly from the inbox.
Both links are personal to each recipient and work without a login.

Choose which lists appear

The preference centre only shows lists you’ve made public. For each list you want recipients to manage:
1

Open your lists

Go to Audience → Lists.
2

Show the list

On the list’s card, switch on Show in preference center. The switch is on the card, so use card view if the page is showing the list view.
3

Describe it (optional)

Click the pencil icon on the card and add a Description, such as “One email a month with product news”. Recipients see it under the list’s name.
When a recipient saves their preferences, only public lists are changed. Their memberships in lists you haven’t shown stay as they are. A list they untick keeps them as Unsubscribed on that list, so your list counts and the contact’s history show the opt-out. See Lists.

Unsubscribe from all emails

Unsubscribe from all emails in the preference centre, the footer’s Unsubscribe link and one-click unsubscribe all do the same thing: they unsubscribe the contact from every list and mark the contact as unsubscribed. Setting a contact back to active doesn’t re-subscribe them to their lists. Each list has to be opted back in separately.
Unsubscribed contacts still receive mail sent with a transactional send policy, such as receipts and password resets.

Brand the pages

Go to Settings → Preference centre to customise how the preference centre and unsubscribe pages look: Use {company} in the text to insert your workspace name. The preview shows the page in the language you’re editing. Click Save when you’re done.

Write the text in each language

The heading, intro and footer note can be written separately for each language your workspace uses. If your workspace has more than one language (Settings → General → Supported languages), the text fields have one tab per language:
  • The default tab, first and marked as the default, is the text for recipients who read your workspace’s default language.
  • Every other tab is the text for recipients who read that language.
Each field is chosen on its own. For a recipient reading, say, Japanese:
  1. If you’ve written that field on the Japanese tab, they see it.
  2. If not, they see the built-in Japanese text: Email preferences and the standard intro, translated. There’s no built-in footer note, so it’s left out.
Recipients who read your default language see what you wrote on the default tab, and the built-in text for any field you left blank.
Text on the default tab is never shown to recipients who read another language. If your default language is English and you set the heading to “Your Preferences”, a Japanese recipient still gets a Japanese heading: yours from the Japanese tab, or the built-in one.
Portuguese (Brazil) and Portuguese share one tab, because the page has one set of Portuguese text.

Languages

The built-in text is available in 26 languages: English, Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. That covers every language you can give a contact. Arabic and Hebrew pages read right to left. The page language is chosen in this order:
  1. the contact’s language
  2. your workspace’s default language (Settings → General)
  3. the recipient’s browser language
  4. English
To put the link somewhere else in your email, use the {{preferences_url}} merge tag, for example:
If your template already has an unsubscribe link but no preference centre link, Manage preferences is added in front of the unsubscribe link automatically. If a template has no unsubscribe link at all, a full compliance footer is added when it’s sent.
With a custom link domain (Settings → General), the preference centre and unsubscribe pages are served from your domain.

Troubleshooting

None of your lists has Show in preference center switched on.