Best practices for email marketing lists

In this article, you will learn best practices and recommendations for creating and maintaining lists in your ActiveCampaign account.

Watch the ActiveCampaign Lists 101 video

Marketing List Types

Marketing List types represent the communication types opted in by your contacts to help you manage channel-specific subscriptions. This ensures your subscribers will receive communication and content that aligns with their subscription preferences.

Lists help manage consent, opt-ins, and subscriptions across different communication channels. Separate SMS lists are essential due to differing regulatory requirements from email.

Maintaining separate lists also gives contacts control over their subscriptions. If a contact unsubscribes from emails, they can still get SMS messages if they signed up for them. Likewise, replying STOP to an SMS only stops SMS messages, but they can still receive emails.

When creating your lists, you have the choice between the following two options:

• Email Marketing
  This list type is used to collect contacts that have subscribed to your email campaigns. Learn how to create an email marketing list.
• SMS Marketing
  This list type is used to collect contacts who opted in to receive your broadcast SMS messages. Learn how to create an SMS marketing list.

How many lists should I have?

We recommend maintaining fewer lists and refraining from creating one-off lists to send an email. You can also create segments to further group and target your audience based on behavioral characteristics, interests, actions, engagement, and source. Doing so can increase engagement, positively impacting your deliverability, sender reputation, and inbox placement.

For Email marketing, it’s a best practice to create a General Marketing list in your account that will act as the primary email list for your contacts. You can also rename the master contact list in your account to “General Marketing list.”

For SMS Marketing , creating a General SMS Marketing list in your account for your primary SMS broadcast sends is also best practice. Learn how to create an SMS marketing list.

From here, you can create additional marketing lists relevant to your business. Some common list types include Newsletters, Event Updates, Promotion Updates, Education, and Feedback.

Remember not to overload on lists; you want to create fewer lists specific to your business’s communication and content needs. It’s also important to only send email campaigns to opted-in contacts, SMS broadcasts to opted-in contacts, and remove folks who don’t engage with your communications. See the List Hygiene section below for more information on keeping your lists clean.

Naming convention and organization

When creating lists, we recommend keeping their names short yet descriptive and using a consistent naming convention.

Lists should be organized according to the communications you want to send (channel and content type). For example:

• [Email] General Marketing list OR Email - General Marketing list
• [SMS] Reminders OR SMS - Reminders

Practice list hygiene with these tips

It is crucial to maintain healthy list practices and abide by your contacts' preferences. We recommend removing unengaged contacts from your lists so that you can communicate with those who want to hear from you.

For Email marketing lists, sending emails to unengaged contacts can harm your email deliverability, campaign performance, and sender reputation, especially if they mark your email as spam.

For SMS Marketing lists, if a contact marks your SMS as spam, there may not be immediate consequences, but a high volume of spam reports can lead to carrier filtering, causing messages to be blocked. In severe cases, spam complaints can impact TCPA and 10DLC compliance, potentially resulting in fines or penalties. Learn more about A2P 10DLC Fines and Penalties.

We recommend setting up a few different automations in your account to help with list hygiene:

• Expedited list cleanup
  This automation unsubscribes contacts from all lists who have not engaged with any of your campaigns in the last 90 days.
• Track contacts’ last engaged dates and perform ongoing list cleanup
  Use three automations to track contacts’ last engaged dates, unsubscribe unengaged contacts within 90 days of being added to your account, and unsubscribe unengaged contacts within six months of their last engaged date.
• Use automation to win back subscribers before removing them from your list
  You can use this option to reach out to subscribers before unsubscribing them from your lists. You may want to take this opportunity to have them update their subscription preferences in your preference center. You need a minimum of 90 day’s worth of data to use this option.