Permissions, preferences and interests: how to create a sustainable email marketing setup

With a return of between $10 and $50 for every $1 spent (Litmus), email is still a channel worth protecting. But the payoff only holds when your messages reach the inbox and speak to the right people. That depends on getting three things right: permissions, preferences and interests. Two pressures make that harder than it used to be.

The first is regulation. Permission-based email marketing is an expanding legal requirement, from the GDPR to recent decisions on open tracking and consent from regulators in France (CNIL) and Italy (Garante). We break down what these mean for senders in our guide to email tracking pixels and consent. On top of that, mailbox providers set their own bar too: once your spam-complaint rate rises above about 0.3%, they start keeping your email out of the inbox.

The second is personalisation. Contacts expect mailings that match their preferences and interests. Without a clear structure behind permissions, preferences and interests, building the right audience for each send turns into manual work, and manual work is error-prone.

With the right structure, the benefits compound. Targeting and personalisation get easier, because you know what each contact is interested in. Unsubscribes drop, because you send mailings people actually care about. Your list stays healthier, and compliance becomes something you proactively keep.

This guide explains what each of the three is, how to decide what belongs where, and how to build a setup that stays compliant and easy to target as your list grows. The approach is the same whichever tool you use, and where it helps, the examples show how it works in Spotler Mail+.

Permission, preference or interest?

The three sit at the heart of any permission setup, each doing a different job.

As a rule of thumb, permissions manage communication choices. Preferences and interests make that communication more relevant.

Start with communication choices

Do not create a separate permission for every newsletter, campaign or topic. Ask one question instead: should a contact be able to stop receiving one type of communication while still receiving another?

• If yes, those messages may need separate communication choices.
• If no, they can sit under the same broader choice.

The goal is not to use as many permissions as possible, or as few. It is to create choices that make sense to your recipients and to your organisation.

Test your knowledge: permission or not?

Imagine a company that sends a monthly customer newsletter, promotional updates about products, and content about different product categories.

A contact might want the newsletter, but only about specific products. Within it, they might prefer English as their language, and content about Product A rather than Product B.

Those are all preferences and interests, not extra permissions. In this case, the communication question that should be answered is which choices the recipient should genuinely be able to manage on their own.

Common email permission setups

Most accounts fall into one of three patterns.

1. One simple communication stream

If you mainly send one type of communication and recipients do not need several independent choices, a simple setup is often enough. Do not add permissions without a clear reason.

2. Several independent communication choices

If someone should be able to unsubscribe from one type of communication while keeping another, you may need separate choices. Topics within those communications do not automatically need their own permission. They are usually better handled as interests.

3. Contacts come from another system

If a CRM, webshop or another source feeds contacts into your email platform, ask what happens to an unsubscribe. If someone unsubscribes today and is imported or synchronised again tomorrow, does that unsubscribe still hold?

Decide which system owns consent, preferences and interests, and which systems are allowed to update them.

Who will actually receive a mailing?

These choices do more than organise your data. They also affect who is eligible to receive a given mailing.

Say you select 10,000 contacts for a campaign. The number who actually receive it can be lower, because some contacts:

• do not have the relevant permission
• have unsubscribed
• are excluded by technical sendability rules
• are removed through deduplication or other checks

So it helps to separate two questions:

• Who do I want to reach?
• Who is actually eligible to receive this communication?

If your final audience is smaller than you expected, the permission and unsubscribe setup is the first place to look.

Decide this before you configure anything

Before you create permissions, forms or lists, answer six questions:

1. What communication do we send?
2. Which choices should recipients manage independently?
3. What is only a preference or an interest?
4. What should happen when someone unsubscribes?
5. Which system owns these choices?
6. What happens when a contact is imported or synchronised again?

Once those answers are clear, the technical setup is much easier.

When to get a second opinion

A standard setup may not be enough when:

• several brands or organisations communicate from one account
• contacts are regularly re-imported
• several systems update permissions or subscription data
• different communication types must stay independent
• you are redesigning an existing setup

In these cases, map the communication choices and the data flow before you change the configuration. You don’t have to do that on your own. Once you sign up with Spotler, our specialists work alongside you to get the permissions setup right.