managing leads that can only be contacted once a year

[Reanna_Pelkey]

Hi,

My company has a list of leads that can only be contacted once a year. Currently the team that owns this list marks the leads as Email Opt Out = True in our database and then when they send the yearly email they update the Email Opt Out to False temporarily. I don't like the current process because if one of those leads fills out the form to officially opt-out we could be ignoring that when they mass update to False. It is possible that this one list will grow to multiple lists.

Does anyone else have a segment/list of leads that can only be contacted x number of times? how do you manage those leads?

Thanks,

Reanna

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Reanna,

1. You should use the field "Marketing suspended" rather than the "Email opt Out" (that is sync'ed with the Unsubscribed" field in Marketo.
2. You might want to add the in a static list in Marketo and set up a smart campaign that monitors all the members of that list, and checks they remain "Marketing suspended" permanently. If you want the system to grow, you can use multiple static lists.
3. For the yearly communication, you can use an operational email, that will be sent through even if the person is marketing suspended or unsubscribed.

-Greg

[Grace_Brebner3]

I agree with Greg's suggestion, it's a much cleaner approach. The only thing I'd add to be aware of (which will be true whether you use unsub or suspend) is that any operational email which these people qualify for will be sent to them - e.g., operational form submission autoresponders, etc.

This isn't inherently bad - it's by design and in most cases what you would want to have happen. You'll just want to be aware of it in the odd case that it's not

[Denise_Greenb12]

To add to Greg and Grace's replies - you could take Greg's approach and then have your campaign that sends the yearly email look like this:

Smart List:

Static List(s) of Yearly Email Recipients

Flow:

Change Marketing Suspended to False

Send Yearly Email

Change Marketing Suspended to True

That way if someone in the list actually unsubscribes, they won't receive the annual email (which they shouldn't, unless it truly qualifies as operational. The downside is that another email that they happen to qualify for could go out to them while Marketing Suspended is temporarily set to False. To overcome that, if you have "Marketable" segmentation that includes a segment for people that gets excluded from all email sends, you could add "member of list: annual email recipients" to that exclusion segment.