Scrubbing Your Lists Using VR

We've had a bunch of questions in the VR Lounge about people wanting to scrub, merge or segment their lists. (Plug: if you haven't been there, log into your account and click on 'Community', tons of people talking about email marketing.)

Here are two common scenarios and the instructions for getting the data you need in a matter of seconds!

I need to send a campaign but want to scrub out anyone on my list who received a mailing I sent last week. How can I do this?

1. Click the Lists tab within your account.
2. Click Segments in the sub-menu, then create a new segment.
3. Give your segment a name and an optional description.
4. Choose your Segment Type.  In this case select: Segment List Members & Campaign Recipients.
5. Click Save and Build Segment.
6. Click Add List Rule to select the list(s) you plan to use for your new email campaign, then click Done.
7. Now click Add Campaign Rule and select the campaign(s) that you mailed last week, then click Done.
8. Click on the OR operation (joins the two rules you made) until you get to EXCLUDE.
9. You can now click Save & Get Results and this will produce a set of results that removes any email addresses on your mailing list(s) that received the campaign(s) you sent last week. 
10. Go ahead and save this as a new mailing list and attach it to your outgoing email campaign.

I've got a ton of mailing lists, is there a way to combine them all into one master list?

1. Click the Lists tab within your account
2. Click Segments in the sub-menu, then create a new segment.
3. Give your segment a name and an optional description.
4. Choose your Segment Type.  In this case select: Merge List Members.
5. Click Save and Build Segment.
6. Select all the lists you want to merge together (duplicates will be removed based on email address.) 
7. Click Done, then click Save & Get Results.
8. You will now see the results of your merge with a grand total of all records combined and you can now save this as a new mailing list. 
9. If you'd like to go into your list management section of your Home Tab and now delete all the individual lists that make up your newly merged list as the last step of the "clean up" process you can do so as well since all the data is now available on your newly created merged list.

If you want other ways to segment, comment and we'll do another blog or webinar.

Comments

[michelle]

I would like to know how to cease mailing to people that never open my campaigns!

Is there a way to segment a list in this way?

[Mark]

This is a great way to test 2 subject lines when you have multiple lists that may contain duplicate emails.