During the past decade, email marketing industry has gone through from significant shifts, and survived the fierce competition of digital marketing space. To deal the challenge of being adequate choice in the market, email eventually has become smarter choice than ever. The year was 2012, when theSMTP started its operations as web based opt-in & permission based email marketing service. After recognizing some of the biggest challenges like optimized deliverability, better choices for record segmentation, advanced statistics, more customizable sending patterns and top-notch functionality for email automation, theSMTP with collaboration of Mumara, has implemented a whole new structure, covering long list of features and new range of improved functionality. This blend of theSMTP and Mumara brings some of the most exciting features. theSMTP Revitalized is a new series of blog that would try to sketch the summary of this new structure, List Management is the first blog of this series.

List management isn’t limited to creating of the lists anymore, number of options have been added for better control, management and convenience. It has whole new way of dealing with custom fields, email is typically considered as default field, and other than the email, remaining fields to input contact’s details are considered as custom fields.

But the businesses or marketers who frequently use email as a regular channel of communication have this tendency to use some of the custom fields as standard practices, like First and Last name are the common examples. After recognizing the importance of these fields, new structure of theSMTP has incorporated these largely used custom fields into the default structure of the application, and these fields can be selected by ticking the simple checkboxes. It certainly adds convenience that you aren’t required to create these fields anymore; it is just one tick away to make some of these fields a part of your list.

Apart from these largely used fields, there are still certain unique fields that someone may need to create at some point, like to input Gender information of the contacts in the list, one may need a field for “Gender”. These fields are separately arranged in the menu of lists, and can be created using custom field functionality. The additional information other than the email, helps sending personalized stuff and applying detailed criteria for segmenting records.

You can apply long list of filters to slice and dice currently available lists. You can apply filter to separate out bounced contacts among the selected list(s), openers of specific list(s), clickers that have clicked particular link, and list of other filters that you can apply to create smaller and targeted segments from the selected list(s).  Filtered records automatically create and save a new segment that can later be used to send email campaigns, just like a list.

The functionality of another important feature within lists has been enhanced to a good extent, the feature we know as suppression or “Don’t Send To “list. My List menu has managed separate pages to maintain different kind of suppression list, a new way of dealing the suppression allows suppressing not only the email contacts, but also particular domains and IPs that you want to omit during future campaigns.  You can import list of contacts, can add domains and list of IPs that you want to suppress as per your preferred way of suppression between, globally across all the lists or for specific list only.