Design your preference center
Design your Mailsoftly preference center, then see the recipient's side: their own language, one-click unsubscribe, resubscribe and opt-outs you cannot undo.
The preference center is the branded page where subscribers manage their subscriptions instead of unsubscribing outright. This guide shows what they see and how to make it look like you.
One idea makes the whole page click: contact lists choose who you send a campaign to, and email subscriptions decide who receives it. You will look at the subscriber facing page, open the preference page designer, set up your subscriptions, wire each one to a contact list, then style it to match your brand. The last three steps cross to the other side of the send and cover what your recipients see and do there.
See what your subscribers see
Start with the subscriber view. This is the branded page people reach when they choose to manage their subscriptions. Depending on how you set it up, they see a toggle for each email subscription you offer, or a simple choice between a couple of categories, plus a Save preferences button and an Unsubscribe from all emails link. Giving people this choice keeps more of them subscribed than a single unsubscribe link would.
Now open the designer to shape that page.
Open the preference page designer
Open the Preference page designer to control how that page looks and works. It is organized into cards for Subscriptions, Content, Branding, and Footer details, with a live preview beside them that you can flip between Desktop and Mobile. Everything you change here is reflected on the live subscriber page.
Start by deciding what subscribers can actually choose.
Open the preference page designer
Set up your email subscriptions
Open the Subscriptions card to define what contacts can subscribe to. The card states the rule the whole page runs on: lists choose who you send to; subscriptions decide who receives. Press Add to create a subscription with a name and a description, both of which subscribers see on the page. A per subscription toggle controls whether each one shows on the unsubscribe page, and your default subscription stays locked so there is always something to fall back on. Well named subscriptions let people opt out of one kind of email without leaving your list entirely.
Once your subscriptions exist, you can send new subscribers of each one straight into a contact list.
Link a subscription to a contact list
When you offer more than one email subscription, each one can feed a contact list for you. In the Subscriptions card, every subscription has a select labeled "Add subscribers to list (optional)". Leave it on "Don’t add to a list", choose "+ Create a list named after this subscription" to quick-create and link a fresh list in one move, or pick one of your existing lists. Once a subscription is linked, its row shows a badge that reads Subscribers join, followed by the linked list’s name, and that name links straight to the list. From then on anyone who subscribes, whether on a signup form, by re-subscribing here on the preference page, or through an admin action, is added to the linked list for you, with no manual import. Joining a list this way can also trigger any automation that starts when a contact is added to a list.
Save it and a toast confirms which list new subscribers will join.
The link works in both directions, so the list always mirrors who is subscribed. Adding someone to a linked list, by hand or through an import, also re-opens the subscription if a teammate had opted them out earlier. A person’s own opt-out is never overridden this way; only they can undo it, from this preference page.
Each subscription feeds at most one list, and each list can be fed by only one subscription, so there is never a question about which subscription a list mirrors. Linking only ever adds people to a list: opting out of a subscription never removes anyone from the linked list.
With your subscriptions and lists wired together, make the page look like you.
Style it to match your brand
Use the Content card to set a Page heading and an optional message, then the Branding card to set your Brand color and Logo so the page feels like the rest of your emails. The Footer details card carries your firm name and address. Press Save changes and it applies to the live page right away, with no separate publish step.
A preference center that looks like you builds trust. Subscribers who recognise your brand are more likely to stay than to leave.
The page is yours now. The rest of this guide is about the person on the other end of it, because most of what happens there happens without you.
See the page the way a recipient does
Nobody signs in to reach this page. The link in your email footer carries a token that stands for one address, so the page opens on the first click, on any device, with nothing to remember and nothing to type. The card names the address it is managing, shows the switches you set up, and offers Save preferences with an Unsubscribe from all emails link underneath. Saving lands them on a short "You’re all set" card with an Edit preferences link, so a change never feels final.
The page also arrives in their language rather than yours. Mailsoftly reads the language your recipient’s own browser asks for and renders the page in the first one it can serve out of English, Turkish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, German and Italian. If the browser asks for something else, the page falls back to the language of your account, then to English. Your German reader gets German while you write in English, and you set nothing up to make it happen.
A switch that is on means the person has not opted out of that subscription. It is a filter rather than a mailing list, so they still only receive a campaign if they are also on the contact list you send it to. A small number of accounts run a variant where a linked subscription’s switch mirrors list membership instead, and switching it on adds the person to that list. Mailsoftly sets that per account and you cannot turn it on yourself, so if you are unsure which one you have, the designer’s preview always shows the version your recipients get.
Most people never open that page, though. They use the button their mailbox gives them.
One-click unsubscribe, and the way back
Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft put their own Unsubscribe control next to the sender name on bulk email. That control is theirs, not something you place in your template, and it appears because Mailsoftly puts two standard headers, List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post, on every campaign you send, whichever sending route your account uses. Offering it is part of being treated as a legitimate sender now, so it is one of the quiet reasons your mail lands.
What the click does on our side depends on the campaign. If you set an email subscription on it, the person is opted out of that one subscription and everything else you send still reaches them. If the campaign had no subscription set, the same click is a full opt-out and nothing more goes to them. Either way the change is written against their address with the source One-click unsubscribe, so you can see later exactly how it happened.
Nobody is stuck with the choice. Someone who lands on the goodbye page finds a Resubscribe button on it, under a line that says so plainly: changed your mind, you can resubscribe any time. Resubscribing lifts the full opt-out and puts them back on the preference page to fine tune, and any single subscription they had already switched off stays off.
Set an email subscription on every campaign you send. A per subscription opt-out only filters campaigns sent under that subscription, so a campaign with no subscription set ignores the choice your recipient made.
There is one thing that choice does that nothing on your side can undo.
The opt-out you cannot undo for them
Open any contact and look at the Email subscriptions card. A subscription a teammate switched off carries a switch you can click back on, because an admin may undo an admin’s decision. A subscription the person switched off themselves carries a padlock instead, the line under the name reads Opted out by recipient with the date, and the padlock says why on hover: "The recipient opted out. Only they can resubscribe."
The same rule holds everywhere it could be worked around. The bulk subscription action skips anyone who opted out themselves. The unsubscribes page offers a remove action only for addresses your own team unsubscribed, never for someone who unsubscribed themselves. A decision a person made about their own inbox stays theirs, which is also the answer when a colleague asks you to switch someone back on: you cannot, and neither can we, but they can, from the preference link in any email they still get from you.
A padlock can mean something else too. A contact who is globally unsubscribed, or whose address bounced or filed a spam complaint, is locked for deliverability reasons rather than by their own choice, and that padlock points you at support instead.
Design the page well and you get fewer full unsubscribes. Respect what people do on it, in the language they read it in, and you get the thing behind the numbers: a list that wanted to be there.
Ready to try it in your own account?
Free to start with your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account. No credit card required.
