Profile Center

What Is the Profile Center

The profile center is a webpage where subscribers can enter and maintain the personal information that you keep about them.

When you import a list, you can import attribute values for your subscribers that appear when a subscriber visits the profile center. The subscriber can update their information on this page and provide additional information. Your subscribers can view their data and their subscriptions to your communications.

Every email that you send contains a link to the Profile Center for subscribers to use.

Note: This link is included by default in emails based on standard templates. For HTML emails, you're prompted to include the link when building the email.

In the Profile Center, subscribers see all of the attributes that are defined in your account that you don't mark as hidden. If the attribute is set up as read-only, the subscriber can see his or her value for that attribute but cannot change it. In compliance with the latest  CAN-SPAM laws, every Profile Center page now includes a global opt-out option.

The Profile Center also works closely with the Subscription Center.

What Should Go in the Profile Center

The ExactTarget application uses the information in the Profile Center to personalize emails sent to your subscribers. The link in each email send connects your subscribers directly to their Profile Center page, and subscribers can log into their Profile Center page to view and change this information. This link appears in a default footer. To remove the default footer, you must contact your ExactTarget representative. 

If an email is forwarded to another person via an email client instead of Forward To A Friend, the links contained in the email will lead to the original subscriber's Profile Center page. This also applies to the Subscription Center and Unsubscribe links. 

To help protect the privacy of your subscribers, be sure that the information you enter in the Profile Center does not include sensitive or extremely personal information about your subscribers. Include only the information you need to manage the profile and nothing more. If an email is forwarded to another person via an email client instead of Forward To A Friend, the links contained in the email will lead to the original subscriber's Profile Center page. This also applies to the Subscription Center and Unsubscribe links. Include only the information you need to manage the profile and nothing more.

Why Use the Profile Center

Use the Profile Center when you want to view the attributes for a subscriber. However, subscribers use the Profile Center to update their personal information without having to call customer service.

How To Preview the Profile Center

To see what the Profile Center looks like to a subscriber, follow these steps:

1. In the navigation pane, click Subscribers.

2. In the Subscribers area of the navigation pane, click Profile Management or Preference Management.

The Profile Center displays all attributes (profile and preference attributes). You'll see the same preview regardless of whether you access the preview from the profile management workspace or the profile management workspace.

3. In the profile/preference management toolbar, click Preview Profile Center, which opens the web page that subscribers see.

Note the following about the Profile Center:

• Attributes shown with a red asterisk are those that are defined in your account as required.
• Attributes that are defined in your account as hidden are not displayed.
• Attributes that are defined in your account as read-only data cannot be edited.