Mailing lists in marketing

With the help of mailing lists, you can easily collect external or internal contacts. When assigning a mailing list to marketing activities or correspondences, all contacts collected in the list are included as a common distribution list. Thus, it is not necessary to assign contacts one by one. Also, mailing lists can be used any number of times and where needed.

The contacts concerned can be collected in the Members tab of a mailing list that can then be used and found in the Tasks, Sales and Mar­keting tabs. At this point, marketing actions can be associated directly with a mailing list. The entry in the Save as field is used by assignments in all selection dialogs.

Tip: In distribution lists, a standard filter, "My members" (account manager filter by contact relationships), can be used. In addition, a distribution list can be transferred to an ad-hoc list ("Transfer to ad hoc list" func­tion).

You can create mailing lists by various aspects, e.g., from the contact overview for all prospects within a specific period of time, or all persons of a specific key account manager, all contacts with a specific status, etc. When doing so, you can use the Quickfinder as well as filter functions.

1. Open a marketing action and switch to the tab for contacts, depending on the type of the action.
2. Click the Select contacts button to open the selection dialog for contacts.
3. Create relations to the selected records.
4. If you have created mailing lists, you can also search for and allocate them in the selection dialog.
5. Afterwards, select one or more mailing lists and select Explode groups from the function bar.
6. All contacts are assigned the first milestone (e.g. "included in case").
7. Add further external contacts to the case as needed. Note that the chronologically first miles­tone is automatically assigned to all new contacts.
8. Save the record!

Mailing lists are ideal for comfortably providing contacts for mass emails. You can do this by selecting the contacts individually, or by using ad-hoc lists or filters, but you should always collect the contacts in individual mailing lists.

This procedure also enables you to provide topic-based newsletters in the form of a serial email with target-group and topic-oriented mailing lists. Furthermore, this has the advantage that it lets you set the status of each contact individually in the respective topic-oriented mailing list.

Mailing lists can also be used for series emails via external email systems. External email systems provide extensive logs and reports, enabling the sender to recognize undeliverable emails (bounces), react to subscribing and unsubscribing, etc.

After integrating an external email solution (e.g. Inxmail Professional or CleverReach), the Members list allows you to set the status to subscribed, unsubscribed, or bounce. This specifies the recipient's reaction individually in the distribution list, and recipients do not need to be blocked on the spot.

For a CRM-based series email that is transferred to an external email system, the distribution list must be specified in the header (button Mailing list…). This is done automatically if the distribution list has been specified in the header of a publication or event (not on the Recipients tab) for which the series email, which is to be passed to the external email system, is being created.