I am currently auditing a client’s Lists and proposing some best practices and organization structure to help them keep their portal clean, useful, and efficient.
The bulk of their current lists (not many, about 160) have been created for either:
- Sending an email
- Testing something
- Produced by an email or workflow
As I have started my audit and am making suggestions, and doing research to how others think about this, it brings up some questions, in particular, how long should we keep a list for an email send? It is somewhat useful, and probably has an expiration date. The other list types can definitely be killed.
I have proposed the following categories, but am really curious about how other people think about lists?
My suggested approach:
Lists should be seen as building blocks. You want to have as many as necessary, and as few as possible. Too many lists, especially active lists, in addition to providing clutter, can actually start to slow your portal eventually.
Lists should primarily be used for:
- Understanding how many contacts meet a certain criteria and displaying additional data for each record
- Building a segment of contacts to send an email (or drip or other campaign) to (using combined lists or lists to exclude contacts)
- Building reports based on list membership
- Triggering a workflow or filtering a workflow based on list membership
- Cleaning data, updating data, importing data, and keeping track of data changes
| Category/Folder | Use |
|---|---|
| Marketing Status | Segment by marketing subscriptions and preferences and who you want to exclude from communication |
| Engagement Status | Segment by recency of engagement |
| Lead Status | Segment by contact status |
| Contact Types | Segment by contact type |
| Markets | Segment by market |
| Renter Lists | Segment by key renter criteria |
| Homeowner Lists | Segment by key homeowner criteria |
| Imports | Track imports into the database |
| Campaigns | Build segments for email and drip campaigns, and other types, and track engagement |
| Form Submissions | Segment by form submission |
| Data Hygiene & Updates | Clean data, update data, and keep track of data changes |
| Testing | “Sandbox” for building lists |
| User Specific (for each user) | Users can create their own lists and keep track of them |