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How to use Preferences on forms
How to use Preferences on forms

Learn how to ask subscribers what they want to hear about (or how often) from the start of your relationship

Petra Molnar avatar
Written by Petra Molnar
Updated over a week ago

Do you want to let your subscribers tell you what they want to hear about? And automatically segment them based on their interests when opting into your list?

Our Preferences feature on forms helps you personalize content or email frequency from the start of your subscriber relationship.

You can customize the question you'd like to ask subscribers, their options, the associated segments—and even the look and feel.


With Preferences, you can ask whatever you want, but two of the most common questions that can help you customize your email marketing strategy are:

  • "What do you want to hear about?" This question helps you understand what content topics your subscribers are interested in.

  • "How often do you want to hear from me?" This question helps you understand how often your subscribers want to receive emails.

How to enable Preferences for your form

While editing a new form—or an existing one—click on the background area, outside of the form itself, and you can access the Preferences toggle on the settings panel on the right sidebar under the 'Form' menu.

Once you've enabled Preferences for your form, click on the question or one of the options to start editing.

Each preference option needs to be connected to a segment. When subscribers opt-in to an option, they will be added to the segment(s) you choose here.

Note: you can add an unlimited number of segments to a Preference and your subscribers can opt-in to as many or as few Preferences as they like.

In our below example, if a subscriber marks the 'White wine' preference, they will be automatically added to the segment you've selected: 'Pouring white'.

You can now send highly targeted, relevant emails about white wine to the subscribers who clicked the "White wine" preference and exclude them from a sale that only offers, say, red wine.

Note: Subscribers will still be added to the segment you initially selected when you created your form in addition to the Preference segments they select.

To double-check which segment you set for your form:

  • Go back to your Forms dashboard

  • Hover over the form's card

  • Click the 3 dots (...)

  • Choose 'Change segments'

How many Preferences can I add to a form?

To ensure an optimized experience for your subscribers, you can add up to a total of 6 Preferences to a form by clicking the + Add button.

When you reach this limit, you will see an alert message as shown below.

You can remove a Preference by hovering over it, clicking the 3 dots (...) and selecting Delete.

How to match Preferences on a form to your brand

Just like when editing the main text of your form, you can set your choice of font, font size and font color for your Preferences.

Click on the Font tab to access all the usual customization options:

As an added bonus, we have various beautiful Preference checkbox designs to select from under the Style tab, including circle and heart.


Important: Preferences on Forms are not connected to the Preferences Page that your subscribers see when they click on the 'Manage preferences' link in your email footer.

For example, you can ask about content type here—What do you want to hear about? And then ask about frequency on the Preferences Page—How often do you want to hear from me?

To learn how these work together to help you customize content from the start of—and throughout—your subscriber relationship read our article What is the difference between Preferences in Forms and the Preferences Page?


Let's sum it up!

Our Form Preferences feature helps you personalize content or email frequency from the start of your subscriber relationship when they opt-in via one of your forms.

You can enable Preferences for new or existing forms by enabling Preferences on the Forms menu.

When subscribers opt-in to a Preference option, they will be added to the segment(s) you specify. You have to specify at least one segment per Preference option.

More to learn:


We'd love to hear about your recent experience when searching for solutions to issues in the Flodesk Help Center (Knowledge Base). With your feedback, we can improve our knowledge base with new and better ways to help you succeed!

Please do not submit support tickets and feature requests via this feedback form.

If you need technical assistance, please submit a support ticket via email at support[at]flodesk.com mentioning your Flodesk account login email with a detailed description of your problem.



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