How To Clean Up Your Marketing List

Marketing lists are at the core of many business’ communications. Usually held in excel form for SMBs (small-to-medium sized businesses), these lists contain vital lead/customer information such as name, company, email address, engagement status (active/in-active), product/service interest and much more. Using these lists, marketing teams can set up essential tasks such as email sends and campaign automations, providing a strategic approach to marketing.  

“These lists allow companies to reach out to the right audience with the right content – playing a crucial role in your marketing efforts” – Kevin Strain, ClickDimensions Marketing Consultant and Marketing List Expert during the Ask the Expert: Segmentation vs Marketing Lists Webinar

Ensuring your marketing lists are up-to-date and accurate is essential for not only business success but also compliance. Failure to keep your lists clean can result in costly fines, legal action and even data protection violations.  

Related News Article “Brands fined £200,000 for sending over 191 million unsolicited emails and 3.6 million text messages” – Source 

Before we get into how to clean up your marketing lists, first we need to establish the types of marketing list that your business may use.  

Types of Marketing List 

There are primarily two types of marketing lists: Dynamic and Static. Both have their benefits and drawbacks, here is a quick overview: 

Dynamic Lists

Lists that automatically update as contacts are added that meet the list criteria.  

Dynamic List Benefits: 

• Automatically updates to add or remove users 
• Efficient in time and cost 
• Scalable 

Dynamic Lists Drawbacks: 

• Dependency of technology 
• Potential to overwhelm/over-target users 
• Risk of privacy concerns if not set up correctly  

Static Lists

A point-in-time list, based on the criteria of the list when it is created 

Static List Benefits: 

• Complete control over the list 
• Messaging consistency  
• Easy to understand and manage 

Static List Drawbacks: 

• Takes a lot of time to create and manage 
• Compliance and deliverability risks – Check out our Email Deliverability Explained blog here to learn more 
• Limited adaptability to changing customer needs 

How To Clean-up Your Marketing Lists 

There are four main ways businesses can clean-up their marketing lists, let’s break them down. 

Criteria Updates

This method is better used for dynamic lists which run the risk of becoming outdated. Updating criteria to match new business products, strategies, goals and so on is a fantastic way of keeping your marketing lists fresh and clean. 

Top Tip: Remember just because the list has been set up to automatically run, that does not mean manual interactions are no longer needed! 

Manual Removal

This applies to both dynamic and static lists, where a user might no longer be classed as ‘active’, and they therefore need to be removed from your lists. In-active contacts can be present in a dynamic list as their own goals might have changed but not been demonstrated and so the contact will fall into the in-active group as the content/messaging is no longer relevant. 

Importing

Specifically, for ClickDimensions users, when importing an excel marketing list, users have the choice to choose ‘add to marketing list’ or ‘remove from marketing list’ depending on the situation. 

One-on-one Updates

This is essential for static lists. If a contact has interacted with a business representative and voiced an interest or lack of interest in a specific product, then users must manually update marketing lists to meet this changing criterion. 

Cleaning-up your marketing lists is essential not only to avoid a costly fine but also to improve business strategy. By having lists that are full of engaged, active contacts your business can provide valuable journeys, messages and content that maximizes productivity and efficiency, leading to a higher number of closed deals and an improved customer experience. 

Ready to learn more about Marketing Lists? Watch our Ask the Experts Marketing List webinar on-demand here. 

Need help cleaning up your Marketing Lists? Reach out to ClickDimensions Marketing Services Team.