Keeping your contact list well-organized will save you time and make leveraging all of ActiveCampaign's features easier to create the best marketing and sales processes possible.
Strategizing how to organize your contacts will help you create the best structure from the beginning, so you don't have to invest time in reorganizing your list later. This article will cover some of your options and give you some things to consider as you decide how to manage your contacts.
List-based organization
We recommend maintaining fewer lists and using segments to break your lists into smaller, targeted groups to send email marketing communications. Lists should represent the broad communication types opted in by your contacts.
Learn best practices for maintaining email marketing lists.
Tag-based organization
Tags are a fast, flexible way to indicate a contact's status or show they are part of a group. You can think of tagging as placing a contact into multiple folders.
We make it easy to filter your contacts by tag, and it is easy to create segments of contacts with tags, so tags are an excellent alternative to list-based organization.
Note that to send to subgroups of contacts, you'll always have to send to a segment. If you create a variety of segments in your account, you'll want to carefully name them so it's always clear what group of contacts is included.
For instance, you could have “General Marketing,” “Promotional Emails,” and “Monthly newsletter” lists and then use tags to categorize different behaviors, interests, or actions to help you better segment your target audience for the next email send. Tag your subscribers by their interests or by the product they ordered from you.
Learn more about contact tags:
Custom fields
You can also use custom fields to organize your contacts by gathering essential data and then using that data to create segments.
For instance, you may have a custom field that indicates interest in a specific product. You could put that custom field on a form so that people can indicate their interest when subscribing to your list.
Learn more about custom fields:
Creating list segments
No matter how you organize your contacts, you'll want to create segments to send targeted email campaigns to subgroups of your lists.
Sending targeted email campaigns has various benefits. When your contacts receive messages relevant to them, they'll be more likely to pay attention to your campaigns. This may help your deliverability and strengthen your relationship with your contacts.
Learn more about segments.