Best Practice: Building Contact Lists

As part of your relationship with us, you will have gone through a Channel Assessment exercise to identify any opportunities for enhancement that could supercharge your channel program performance.  The best practice articles in this section extend the tactical information for specific configuration and use of related tools with more strategic guidance on how to make the most of each Unifyr One feature. 

Contact Lists are integral to ensuring that you foster robust, healthy relationships with businesses and individuals. They also help ensure compliance with data privacy legislation by letting you control how, when, and why you contact people.  Unifyr One contact lists are important for you and your partners. 

If you automatically add contacts to your communications, or if your signup process is not clear, recipients may flag your emails as spam. This may happen if the recipients did not recognize you or did not want your emails in the first place. 

Spam complaints are the top influencing factor on your reputation. It is in your best interest to take every possible measure to minimize the risk of recipients clicking the spam button.

By Readiness Stage

Click the + to expand each section below for more information about best practice at your currently assessed readiness stage.

General Recommendations

• Make your sign-up process clear. Explain what email recipients are signing up for, when they will start receiving emails, and how often they can expect to hear from you.
• Always request explicit consent from recipients to receive messages. 
• Send a confirmatory opt-in email from the same address you will use to send communications.
• Ask subscribers to whitelist you. Encourage them to add you to their safe senders/contact list.
• Use a consistent sender name and email address.
• Contact subscribers regularly. This ensures you are familiar to them.
• Make it quick and easy for recipients to unsubscribe. Add them to the global suppression list.

Undeveloped

• Grow your list organically. If you have purchased a list, consent is not transferable and using these types of lists is not a best practice.
• Monitor the bounce rate. A high bounce rate can affect deliverability and result in account suspension 

Developing

• Send emails that provide value either by educating or describing the resolution of a problem.
• Send emails on a regular schedule. 
• Use contact forms to collect information. 

Defined

•  Segment your master contact list in groups that you can target with well-crafted messages. 
• Stay in contact with recipients. If you haven’t contacted recipients in six months, reconfirm their acceptance.
• Use a subject line that truthfully describes the content of your email.

Advanced

•  Use data from your CRM, tracking tools, or qualified leads.