Combining new and old Targets for useletters, Idea for best practice solution

💬 General Discussion
1

Being new here on one side I am fascinated about the almost endless possibilities of this product on the other side I have quite a few questions.

Usecase
Our company gets targets by our main own webapplication. From time to time we export the users there to generate new targets in Suite CRM.
For newsletters we want to address all old and new targets, except the ones on the suppression list. Targets that opt out are added to the suppression list.

Best practice
As the suppression list is updated automatically with the targets that opted out, always the same one can be used for further campagns.
As a workaround I use the list that I got with the invalid addresses as a second suppression list.

Question
Before my time many duplicats have been generated.
Is it best practice to use the description field to make filters that can be used to filter the targets for the new Targetlist for the new Newsletter?

Kind regards
Solipsist

2

New insights:
I have seen that mass-update for existing entries is suppressed in standard. This is also the reason why my predecessedor generated new targets and didn’t use the option to look for existing ones for each new target list to generate. With an entry in the description field it is possible to track them later.

Still it is not ideal to generate a bunch of duplicates.

Question:
Is the best way to get rid of the existing doubles?
Without the doubles, it is possible to add information to existing targets?

For a long term use I suppose it is preferred to use the customer-list for already registered mails.

I would appreciate to get some best-practice hints.

Kind regards
Solipsist

3

Hello Solipsist,

as for the duplicates:
These are one of your worse enemies in a CRM system.
Try to merge them:

If they have the same email address, technically, they are not duplicates - since emails internally are a related module and two contacts / leads can have the same email address (record / ID).
In campaigns, you’re able to use suppression lists by email:

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However, that doesn’t solve the problem that you might call duplicate records twice, have reports which are wrong and customer lifecycle / status values which don’t reflect your processes and the reality.

One question there: The users are coming from your web app, where they can login using their email? I assume, you can’t have duplicates there in this case?

As for the description field:
No, that’s not best practice. The description field is a free text area and should be used for unstructured data and information for humans, from humans.
For workflows, reports, processes focus on dropdown, date, checkbox fields and other more structured ones.
A good filter could be a dropdown value with a customer lifetime status like:

  • interested
  • onboarding
  • active
  • inactive
  • cancelled

Now, your filter for the users in onboarding is simply: status = onboarding.
They receive communication like: go ahead and complete your onboarding.
The active users receive communication like: new feature, etc.

You’d then have your reports in place, retrieve / import new data and simply add to your target lists via the report:

In order to make this process faster, smoother, more error resistant, I automated this in multiple projects.

There, you’d use your own web app as the source instead of Mautic and add new users automatically to the CRM & to target lists, based on the status in your web app.

1 Like
4

Hello Bastian
Thanks a lot for the clear explanations. Suppression-lists had been used before and I got quickly acquainted with the principle. I also realized that for new targets the suppression list by email had to be used and not by ID

The duplettes where created before my time because the users weren’t aware how to filter targets for making target-lists. That’s why for each new target-list with newly imported targets always all the targets had to be in the csv for the import. To make it somehow work they switched also to importing contacts :face_with_spiral_eyes:

For the urgent newsletter I created my target list, two suppression lists (one with bounces and one with old opted out email-adresses)

Afterwards I want to have consistency in the data so that opted out und inactive can also by used directly from target-proerties

Thanks again
Solipsist