Boost recurring donations this giving season with the new upsell prompt!Learn How >>

Creating and managing email lists

updated

We've built Soapbox Mailer to be different from most other email marketing services.  We understand that our organizations use Soapbox Mailer not just to send out regular email newsletters, but also to send ad-hoc, on-demand emails to highly targeted groups of individuals for specific purposes.  Due to this dual-purpose of Soapbox Mailer, we've currently left the process of creating and managing newsletter lists outside the realm of the packaged Soapbox Mailer service.

That doesn't mean we don't have strong recommendations on creating and managing email lists!  Here's our tips to create email lists that you can use to then target and send messages to your community.

Use the Contacts and Leads objects for storing list preferences

Since you'll likely use Reports to quickly add Campaign Members to your email newsletters, (especially if you have more than a few hundred recipients), you should strongly consider storing the list preferences of your Leads and Contacts within fields in the Leads and Contacts objects.  This will make life much easier for you when creating Campaigns to very easily determine who you want to send your messages.

Use a single-select picklist to define list preferences

In following our best practice of storing email list preferences within a field in the Leads and Contacts objects, we recommend creating a single-select field to represent the status of the Lead or Contact's preference for a mailing list.  This field will contain the following picklist options:  "Subscribed", "Unsubscribed", and null (allowing no value to be chosen). Creating this allows us to know if the person has ever subscribed for this list and if they've requested to be unsubscribed. Create a separate single-select picklist for each of your newsletter lists.  So, if you have 5 newsletter lists, you'd create 5 single-select picklist fields on the Lead and Contact objects.

Sending an email to a specific (or multiple) email lists

With Soapbox Mailer's flexibility, you're able to do something unheard of in most email marketing tools:  you can send to multiple mailing lists at the same time!  Have a list of people subscribed to your customer email list and your prospects email list, but want to send them the same email without the hassle of creating yet another email list? That's easy with Soapbox Mailer!  Simply run a Report that finds all the Contacts (and Leads if you want) that have their newsletter single-select picklist option set to "Subscribed" for your newsletters of choice and whose Email Opt Out field is set to "false", and then click the Add to Campaign button in the Report to send them to the Campaign you've created.

Next steps

Ready to add individuals to your email lists?  Check out our article about "Adding individuals to email lists" to learn more.

Have more questions? Submit a request
Article is closed for comments.