> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.instantcampaign.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Preference centre and unsubscribes

> Let recipients choose which lists they get email from, or unsubscribe from everything, on a hosted page you can brand.

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:

<Steps>
  <Step title="Open your lists">
    Go to **Contacts → Lists**.
  </Step>

  <Step title="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.
  </Step>

  <Step title="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.
  </Step>
</Steps>

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](/guides/audience-and-campaigns/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.

<Note>
  Unsubscribed contacts still receive mail sent with a **transactional** [send policy](/guides/audience-and-campaigns/send-policies), such as receipts and password resets.
</Note>

## Brand the pages

Go to **Settings → Preference centre** to customise how the preference centre and unsubscribe pages look:

| Field                                 | Default when left blank                                                            |
| ------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Logo URL**                          | Your brand logo                                                                    |
| **Accent colour**                     | Your brand's primary colour                                                        |
| **Page background**                   | The built-in background                                                            |
| **Heading**                           | **Email preferences** (translated)                                                 |
| **Intro**                             | The built-in, translated intro                                                     |
| **Footer note**                       | None. Use it for your postal address or a line about how you handle personal data. |
| **Hide "Powered by InstantCampaign"** | The credit line is shown                                                           |

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.

<Tip>
  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.
</Tip>

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

## Link to the preference centre yourself

To put the link somewhere else in your email, use the `{{preferences_url}}` merge tag, for example:

```html theme={null}
<a href="{{preferences_url}}">Update your email preferences</a>
```

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.

<Note>
  With a custom link domain (**Settings → General**), the preference centre and unsubscribe pages are served from your domain.
</Note>

## Troubleshooting

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="The preference centre says there are no subscription options">
    None of your lists has **Show in preference center** switched on.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="A recipient says the link is invalid">
    The link was changed or cut short, for example when it was copied out of the email. Ask them to use the link straight from a recent email.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>