Email Program audience taking entirely too long to populate

[Malik_Zafar2]

It's taking entirely too long to generate these lists, so I wonder if we're doing something incorrectly.

Under an Email Program, is it advised/best practice to add multiple "member of smart list" filters? For example

(1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6) and 7

where the numbers in the parenthesis are all "member of smart list" filters?

Also, our database is pretty big (over a million).

Any suggestions on how to cut down on the amount of time it takes to generate these audiences for email programs? Some have taken a few hours

[Rachel_Noble]

Are you able to post a screenshot of your entire smart list?

[Malik_Zafar2]

Rachel - thanks for the reply. We were able to fix the issue by consolidating some of the smart lists, it seems like having too many smart lists was causing an issue

[Natalie_Kremer]

It is not best practice to use nested Smart Lists within a Smart List as it can really slow down the processing since it needs to run through the logic for each of those Smart Lists, as well. I would recommend replicating as many filters as possible within your Email Program Smart List itself and this should help with the processing time. 

[Grace_Brebner3]

Natalie's completely right here on the why

As another solution though, it's also worth noting that "member of list" runs much faster than "member of smart list" (because it doesn't require the system to rerun an entire other set of rules). This can be a good long term alternative if the smart lists you're referring to are "master" lists that are referenced across numerous campaigns - instead, you set up a program to add/remove from static lists according to certain criteria. 

This can bypass the need to remember a long long list of criteria (which introduces the risk of error and, while faster to process, isn't always ideal).

[Malik_Zafar2]

This is a great suggestion! I will huddle with our team and see if we can convert some of our more regularly referenced smart lists into static lists, and then use smart campaigns to keep them up to date. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Malik_Zafar2]

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion - very helpful!