…and why they work.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt a little hurt from an unsubscribe. Or a thousand. Yeah, me too. When you spend weeks working on a brilliant new campaign, it’s tough not to take them personally.

But it’s about time we stopped treating all unsubscribes like bad break-ups. A good email preferences or unsubscribe page gives your subscribers the simple opportunity to get more emails they love and fewer emails they don’t.

It’s like couples counseling for you and thousands of subscribers. It’s a good thing.

As the resident email geek at MakeMusic, I spend a lot of time subscribing (and unsubscribing) to other companies’ emails looking for new ideas. I see a lot of preference centers. Every now and then, I’ll come across one that makes me smile and shows me that the company cares.

Here are some of my favorites.

#1: Spotify

When a preference center gives me a lot of options, I want to know what exactly each of those options actually means. I don’t want a list of vague categories like “Daily Digest” or “Updates”. What the hell is a “Daily Digest” anyway?

Spotify sets my expectations nicely here. First, they separate notifications into two distinct groups: “Spotify Updates” and “Your Music”. Beyond that, they (briefly) explain exactly what you can expect from each type of notification. That makes it easy for me to choose exactly what I want quickly and easily.

(Unsurprisingly, Litmus also does this beautifully.)

While I don’t think SMS works this well for every brand, it is worth noting that Spotify gives me the option to easily select which SMS notifications I receive here, too.