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
How many lists should I have?
Lists should represent the broad communication types opted in by your contacts. This way, your subscribers will receive communication and content that aligns with their subscription preferences.
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.
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.” From here, you can create additional email marketing lists pertinent to your business. Some common email 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 campaigns 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
Use a preference center to create customer-friendly list names for each list. Doing so lets you have both an internal and public list name. This public list name is only available on the preference center you add it to. It will not change the list name in your account or appear in other preference centers you create.
Practice list hygiene with these tips
It is crucial to maintain healthy email 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.
Sending emails to unengaged contacts can harm your email deliverability, campaign performance, and sender reputation, especially if they mark your email as spam.
We recommend setting up a few different automations in your account to help with list hygiene:
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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 email preferences in your preference center. You need a minimum of 90 day’s worth of data to use this option.