Fun story – when I joined one of my previous companies, I discovered our generic inbox was getting a ton of emails from major league baseball teams every day. Hundreds a day. Someone had signed up our inbox email for every team’s entire subscription center. There’s 30 MLB teams, and each has a subscription center (behind a login, no less) that looks like this, so you can probably imagine the volume of email we were getting.
And I see this echoed in B2B companies all the time. While most are not behind a login, these subscription centers still end up bloated and confusing. But someone at the company thought all these subscription options made perfect sense (and they probably do to an insider).
But they’ve forgotten there’s a big difference between how they internally categorize email, and how their audience does.
By adding a ton of options on your subscription center, you might think you’re offering choice and control, but in reality you’re ending up with a confusing jumble of options that no one except your email marketing team understands. And least of all your customers.
It’s a good idea to build separate subscriptions for truly distinct streams: parent/child companies, wildly different product lines, or distinctly branded initiatives. These all feel different for your subscribers, which is the only scenario a big complicated subscription center ever makes sense.
And if your email program doesn’t have those exceptions? Then stick to the basics. Giving choice and control for your subscribers is important – but don’t confuse “more options” with “better”.