Preference center overview

Setting up a preference center provides a one-stop shop for your users to edit and manage their notification preferences for your email messaging. This article includes steps for building an API-generated preference center, but you can also build a preference center using the drag-and-drop editor.

In the Braze dashboard, go to Audience > Subscriptions > Email Preference Center.

This is where you can manage and view each subscription group. Each subscription group you create is added to this preference center list. You can create multiple preference centers.

Creating a preference center with API

By using the Preference Center Braze endpoints, you can create a preference center, a website hosted by Braze, that can display your user’s subscription state and subscription group statuses. Using HTML and CSS, your developer team can build the preference center using HTML and CSS so that the styling of the page matches your brand guidelines.

Using Liquid enables you to retrieve the names of your subscription groups, and each user’s status. This way, Braze stores and retrieves this data when the page is loaded.

Prerequisites

Step 1: Use the Create preference center endpoint

Let’s begin building a preference center using the Create preference center endpoint. To customize your preference center, you can include HTML that aligns with your branding in the preference_center_page_html field and confirmation_page_html field.

The Generate preference center URL endpoint allows you to grab the preference center URL for a specific user outside of an email that is sent through Braze.

Step 2: Include in your email campaign

To place a link to the preference center in your emails, use the following Liquid tag in the desired place in your email, similar to the way you would insert unsubscribe URLs.

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{{preference_center.${kitchenerie_preference_center_example}}}

You can also use a combination of HTML that includes Liquid. For example, you can paste the following as the URL in either the HTML editor or drag-and-drop editor. This will show the basic preference center layout that lists all of the email subscription groups automatically.

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<a href="{{preference_center.${kitchenerie_preference_center_example}}}">Edit your preferences</a>

The preference center has a checkbox that will allow your users to unsubscribe from all emails. Note that you will not be able to save these preferences if sent as a test message.

Editing a preference center

You can edit and update your preference center by using the Update preference center endpoint.

Identifying preference centers and details

To identify your preference centers, use the View details for preference center endpoint to return related information such as the last updated timestamp, the preference center ID, and more.

Customization

Braze manages the subscription state updates from the preference center, which keeps the preference center in sync. However, you can also create and host your own preference center using the subscription groups APIs with the following options.

Option 1: Link with string query parameters

Use query string field-value pairs in the body of the URL to pass the users ID and email category to the page so users will only need to confirm their choice to unsubscribe. This option is good for those who store a user identifier in a hashed format and do not already have a subscription center.

For this option, each email category will require its own specific unsubscribe link:
http://mycompany.com/query-string-form-fill?field_id=John&field_category=offers

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{% assign my_string = {{${user_id}}} | md5 %}
My encoded string is: {{my_string}}

Option 2: Authenticate with JSON web token

Use a JSON web token to authenticate users to a part of your web server (for example, account preferences) that is normally behind a layer of authentication such as username and password login.

This approach does not require query string value-pairs embedded in the URL as these can be passed in the JSON web token’s payload, for example:

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{
    "user_id": "1234567890",
    "name": "John Doe",
    "category": offers
}

Frequently asked questions

I haven’t created a preference center. Why am I seeing “PreferenceCenterBrazeDefault” on my dashboard?

This is used to render the preference center when legacy Liquid ${preference_center_url} is used, meaning Canvas steps or templates that reference either ${preference_center_url} or preference_center.${PreferenceCenterBrazeDefault} won’t work. This also applies to previously sent messages that included the legacy Liquid or “PreferenceCenterBrazeDefault” as part of the message.

If you reference ${preference_center_url} in a new message again, a preference center named “PreferenceCenterBrazeDefault” will be created again.