You want your Landing Pages to be as effective as possible in gathering subscriber information so that you can make the most of the data that you collect. A well-designed Landing Page is the best way to ensure that:

your subscribers understand what information you're seeking and
you collect information that is as accurate and useful as possible.

Consider the following best practices and recommendations when creating a Landing Page.

Give the Landing Page a subscriber-facing name that articulates its purpose to your subscribers. Be consistent with this naming convention for future Landing Pages.
Make sure that you clearly express what you want from your subscribers in brief, concise sentences and field labels. If you don't, you risk not getting the information that you want and/or frustrating your subscribers.
Clearly state your questions; straightforward "Yes/No" options minimize ambiguity and confusion.
Don't overwhelm your subscribers with too many options; 6–12 per Landing Page is a good range. Carefully consider the different types of messages that you send and add your interests accordingly.
Indicate on the Landing Page any mailings (such as membership news) that subscribers cannot opt out of.
Consider the benefits of using the Auto-subscribe Interests and Auto-fill options on the Landing Page > Process tab. Explore these options in Landing Pages Tabs.
Provide a link to your privacy policy to offer transparency regarding how subscriber data is used and protected. This is especially important in light of worldwide privacy-protection legislation.
You can include an unsubscribe option on the Landing Page but keep it simple and straightforward so that your subscribers know exactly what they are unsubscribing from. Consider also adding a free-form field for subscribers to indicate why they have unsubscribed.

NOTE: An additional account setting is required to allow this in Mailings 2.0.

Before publishing a Landing Page, test it as described in Test a Landing Page.

Landing Pages and integrations

If your Thrive Marketing Professional account is integrated with an Association Management System (AMS) database, you can use Landing Pages to manage your users' preferences; this is called Integrated Preference Management (IPM).

The following Thrive Marketing Professional integrations support IPM:

iMIS (See IPM for iMIS)
MemberSuite (See IPM for MemberSuite)
netFORUM Enterprise 2014 and Later (See IPM for netFORUM Enterprise)
Personify360 (See IPM for Personify360)

Learn more about using Landing Pages to maximize the connection between Thrive Marketing Professional and your integrated database in Landing Pages and Integrated Preference Management.

Use Informz Interests to manage preferences

You can use Thrive Marketing Professional to manage subscriber preferences by creating a Landing Page and populating it with Informz Interests. On the Landing Page, interests will be represented as check boxes.

Create Interest target groups in Thrive Marketing Professional and add the interests to your Landing Page.
Include a link to your Landing Page in your message template.

Create a message with that template as the foundation.

Now, the link to the Landing Page (step 2 above) is automatically included in the message.

When your subscribers click the link and complete the form, their responses (i.e., their "preferences") are automatically recorded in Thrive Marketing Professional.

Learn about Interest Target Groups.

NOTE: Refer to Plan your approach: Opt In or Opt Out to learn how to design an effective Landing Page to more easily manage your subscriber preferences.

Plan your approach: Opt In or Opt Out

After you've got a basic idea of what you want to accomplish with your Landing Page, decide on your approach: opt in or opt out. There's no "better" or "worse" option here because each works equally well when properly planned and designed, and they achieve the same result. The distinction is that they come at subscribers from different angles, based on your preference.

Keep in mind that, with both approaches, you're starting with the idea that "all subscribers receive all mailings," and that opt in versus opt out is more about how you design your Landing Page (and your use of target groups) than it is about your subscribers having to decide what they want to opt in to and opt out of; the Landing Page gives them only one option: opt in or opt out, not both.

NOTE: Make sure that you have created target groups and assigned remote interests to them in Thrive Marketing Professional.

Ultimately, it is important that you:

decide on an approach and stick to it, and then
design your Landing Page accordingly.

Review the information in this section and then, when you're ready to get started with your preferred approach, check out Create a Landing Page.

Interests on a Landing Page

This section provides information on how Interests check boxes work on a Landing Page; it's a good jumping-off point as you consider the approach of your Landing Page.

TIP: Remember, you're starting with the idea that "all subscribers receive all mailings."

On a Landing Page, the Interests check boxes are either checked or not checked. You can design your Landing Page such that the check boxes are:

Checked - subscribers are reminded that they are included in all mailings; they have to uncheck a box to indicate that they no longer want to receive a particular mailing.
Unchecked - subscribers are reminded that they are included in all mailings; they have to check a box to indicate that they no longer want to receive a particular mailing (this approach is shown in the image below).

As you can see, the objective and the result are the same in both approaches; what differs is how the process is presented to your subscribers. In both approaches:

be sure that the text clearly indicates what they are doing and why,
those who take the opt-out action are removed from the associated target group and the mailings, and
those who take no action remain in the associated target group and will be sent messages.

IMPORTANT: Never have opt-in and opt-out options on the same Landing Page. This increases the likelihood of confusing your subscribers and resulting in unintended and/or inaccurate responses.

Opt Ins or Opt Outs

If the objective and the result are the same for both approaches, what, really, is the difference and does it matter?

The "behind-the-scenes" differences are real and are described below to help you decide which is the better approach for you.

Opt In approach

You have no way of tracking which subscribers have removed themselves. To track this, use the opt-out approach.

When a new subscriber record is created (in either your AMS or in Thrive Marketing Professional), every preference will have to be assigned to the subscriber.

Opt Out approach

It's easier to track these opt-out subscribers because they had to take an action to be removed from the group.

These opt-out subscribers must always be excluded—by using a compound target group or at the message level—from the messages that they indicated they do not want to receive.

TIP: Create a compound target group that includes your main target group (e.g., "All Active Members") and excludes your opt-out subscribers. This will ensure that you never forget to factor in the opt-out subscribers.

Learn how to manage subscriber preferences in Profile Fields - Opt-Outs as Interests.

Landing Pages Best Practices