Managing Your Contact List – Let’s Keep It Clean

In the world of email marketing, many people assume that the only goal they have for their contact list is to make sure it grows. At Bronto, we think that keeping that list clean and healthy is just as important as watching it grow. Luckily, we make it easy to give your list a good scrubbing, while at the same time reaching out to non-engaged contacts before cutting them loose.

Our Clean Contacts feature, accessible by going to Contacts –> Manage –> Clean Contacts, can be used in a couple of different ways.  For example, you can use it to remove contacts that are likely to soft bounce into inactivity with your next send, or add those that have not opened or clicked-through on the last 10 messages they have been sent to a new list.

The cleaning process is broken into 4 easy steps.  We’ll look at each step in detail below.

Step 1:  Where

Step one will allow you to choose which list you would like to clean.  You can choose any individual list in your account, or you can choose to clean contacts from all of your lists.  This allows for very targeted cleaning.

Step 2:  Who

In step two, we just have to let the system know which contacts we want to clean. There are a number of options here, so lets take a quick look at each one. First, we can choose to clean Bounced Contacts. These are contacts that have soft bounced between 1 and 4 times (on the 5th soft bounce, they are automatically cleaned).  This can be useful if you are nearing your contact limit and need to make room for a new import.

Next, we have non-engaged contacts. Non-engaged contacts are contacts that have not opened or clicked on a certain number of your past messages.   This is very useful for separating out contacts that have not opened your messages, but that you may want to try and re-engage.   Many of our clients have gotten great results with re-engagement campaigns.  For some excellent tips on how to create an effective re-engagement campaign, check out Kristen Gregory’s Bronto Blog Post ‘Drop Your Email Lists Dead Weight Without Sacrificing ROI‘.

Finally, we have Orphaned contacts. Orphaned contacts are contacts that are just sitting in your account, not associated with any lists.  Unless you send exclusively to segments, these contacts are most likely not being sent to.

Step 3: What

Step three is where we tell the system what we’d like to do with the contacts we’ve just selected.  There are three options here. First we can Clean the contacts. This simply means that they are removed from the account.  We can also add the selected contacts to a newly created list, or to an existing list.

Step 4:  Confirm

When you click Next at the bottom of the page, you’ll be brought to either a confirmation screen, or a screen that will allow you to enter the internal and external names of your new list.  When you are ready, just click Save and the cleaning process will begin.

That’s all there is to it! Our Clean Contacts feature is a quick and easy way to purge your contact list of dead weight and wasted emails, or to set up a list to kick off your next great re-engagement campaign.  Enjoy!

Lucas Weber
Bronto Client Services

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Tagged as: bounce, clean, contacts, Re-engage