Best for marketers with subscribers upwards of 1000 and a lot of custom fields about those subscribers (besides name and mail id). Learn better list management and make the best of your growing audience.
When you have a lot of subscribers and/or custom fields, your types of emails as well as the marketing automation use case increase and that’s when it’s worth thinking about how to manage your lists, and when to add another list, and when just to add a custom field in the same list, you will have to think through how do you plan to use that list or custom field because both of them have their set of constraints.
When thinking about how to manage your lists - when to add another list, and when just to add a custom field in the master list, you will have to think through how do you plan to use that list or custom field because both of them have their set of constraints. But don’t overthink, you can always change everything very easily & we have backups at SendyBOOST in case anything goes bad.
Let me first list down the list of constraints that I feel mostly govern different part of email sending in SendyBOOST.
List of constraints
Lists
Every contacts and its parameters exists inside a list, & it belongs to that list only.
No subscriber can exist outside a list. Custom fields are not universal level, they
are native to a list.
Subscribing & Unsubscribing - Both the actions happen inside a list, if any of these actions is done on a subscriber in one list, it does not impact them in another list.
Custom Fields
Custom fields are not universal level, they are native to a list. Custom fields only
have date & text, no number parameter, so you won’t be able to do a number
comparison, for example, send this email to users who pay less than $10.
Segmentation
Segments are calculated at the time of execution.
Can be done on
Default fields - Sign up date, last activity date, name, email, country, referrer, GDPR status
Custom fields -
Text (no numerical fields) based comparison like contains, starts with etc.
Date based comparison like on, before, after, between.
Can be Included or Excluded in Normal Email Campaign or Auto Responder Campaign
Autoresponders
They also belong to individual list
Drip Campaigns - There can be multiple emails per drip campaign. Drip campaigns can only be sent after 0 or more days of a user being added to a list. For example. When a user is subscribed to a list X
You can’t stop a drip campaign for a user without unsubscribing a user from that list or deleting the drip campaign altogether
'Send annually' and 'Send on date’ - One campaign type of autoresponder per ‘Date based’ custom field. There can be multiple emails in per campaign.
Interesting Automations
There are some interesting features available
Unsubscribe a user from List B if they subscribe to List A
Pro-tip!
One fail safe to upload a sheet is to first download the sample sheet from the dashboard and then paste the exact rows that you would want. This saves errors at the time of uploading.
Now let me list down a few scenarios that can become a base of the framework I would propose
Industry | Scenario | Suggested List management |
SAAS tool | When a user subscribes to a free trial, send a series of emails to onboard the user & make them realize value | - Subscribe a user to a free_trial list when they signup. - Configure drip campaigns - If they subscribe to a paid plan, unsubscribe them from free_trial list |
| When a user subscribes to a paid plan | - Subscribe the user to paid_plan list. - Configure drip campaigns - If they stop their premium plan, unsubscribe them from this list. Note - If you have multiple plans and you would want to send different drip campaigns for each plan, you will have to create separate list for every plan and then do above steps for each plan. |
| When a user cancels a plan, send them a series of emails to inform them what will they miss out on | - Unsubscribe the user from paid_plan, and subscribe them to plan_cancelled list - Configure drip campaigns |
| When a new member is added to an account - Send them a series of email on how they can make the best use of the product | - Subscribe the user to paid_plan list. - Configure drip campaigns - If the user is removed & is not an admin, unsubscribe them from this list |
Online Tutors | Assignment submission deadline reminder | - Schedule a normal campaign for a convenient time before. the deadline. |
| Post exam individual scores to every student | - Add a custom field to save exam score- may_2_physics_score. - Create a csv with student’s email ID & the above custom field. - Upload the sheet, the scores will be updated. - Send a normal campaign and use the above parameter as a personalization parameter in the mail |
Fitness Trainer | Details of upcoming classes in the week for users signed for “Yoga classes” | - Create a custom field - ‘classes_subscribed’ - Create a segment - ‘classes_subscribed’ contains ‘Yoga Classes’ - Send a normal campaign to the above segment. If you would want to automate it, you can do that through using ‘Send on date’ Campaign and setting a week-wise delivery schedule. |
B2B Agency | Birthday or company founding date of the client | - Create a custom_field as required - Create a ‘Sendy Annually’ auto-responder |
Webinar | Send reminder mail to users who signed up for some webinar | - Create a custom_field as required - Create a ‘Send on date’ auto-responder |
| Post webinar promotional email to users who attended a webinar | - Create a custom_field as required - Create a ‘Sendy on date’ auto-responder to send after few days of the ‘webinar_date’ |
Affiliate Marketing Emails | Onboarding emails series to help affiliates setup quickly | - Subscribe the user to affiliates list. - Configure drip campaigns - If they signout from affiliate, unsubscribe them from this list. |
Pro-tip: If you have to update any default or custom field of a subscriber, simply create a csv with email id and the final values of the columns you want to change. The cells which are empty will not be updated.
Other general points to keep in mind regarding list management
Deleting a user - Deleting a user can happen at list level, or at brand level
Hard bounce & Marked as spam users - Everyone on the internet is pretty serious about this stuff. Once a user is bounced, or unsubscribes or marks as spam, there is no way to revert. Shouldn’t be ! Prevents your email delivery rate
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