How do I build quality lists for targeted mailings?

The Constituent Gateway eNewsletter PLUS starts with several standard lists. You may wonder why you would need more than one list; building lists allows you to be more informed about your audience and to reach more people with messages they want to hear. (Learn more about your All Contacts, All Viewers, and All Subscribers). You may send completely different content to your All Viewers lists than you would to your All Subscribers lists. Other times, you might intentionally reach out to both lists with the same content.  A huge part of successful mailing campaigns is knowing your audience and sending them content they want to get. 

Everyone wants to increase their outreach and get their message out to as many people as possible, but you should also be thinking about maintaining quality lists, which will make a huge impact on viewer engagement and deliverability. Beyond your general All Contacts, you should be diligently building your All Subscribers list. Subscribers (or opt-ins) are invested in you and in your message. They are more likely to view your newsletter, provide valuable feedback, and even share your content with others. (Sharing is easy to enable if you're including social shares and the Tell a Friend widget in your mailings.)

While you start out with several standard lists, the Constituent Gateway eNewsletter PLUS also provides a few list building tools.

You can build quality lists a number of ways:

1. Create Custom Attributes for Areas of Interest and associate them to survey responses often.
2. Set up Criteria lists based on location, demographic, or past mailing interactions.
3. Create Blank lists for hot-button issues and associate them to a survey that goes out to All Contacts.
4. Build 499 lists for your 499 campaigns, but you can also use these small lists for A/B testing.

You are not limited to the built-in capabilities of the Gateway, though. Get creative!

1. Build a list within Signal CRM and import it into the Gateway.
2. Depending upon the size of your existing lists, you may want to work with the support team to split larger lists into smaller chunks so you can reach out to smaller groups at a time, thereby improving your deliverability.
3. Ensure sign up options are prevalent on your office's website.
4. Provide sign up opportunities at local events.
5. If you conduct Telephone Town Hall events, include a poll question asking if they'd like to subscribe to your newsletter. 

Once you've built these lists, reach out to these groups. The more targeted your lists are, the more focused your content can be, which will improve engagement, interaction, sharing, and deliverablity.