Best practice guidelines for when tagging contacts in an existing list vs creating an inde[...]

Bradley Bartram (1219)

We've had several situations where we have smaller lists of contacts representing webinar registrations, competition entrants etc. The paradigm we've inherited from previous systems is adding these contacts to an existing list and tagging their status related to the event or source, but would it be more appropriate in Marketing Cloud to import such contacts as a special purpose list that can be directly targeted? Should we be creating new contact lists freely for this kind of thing?

 

Can anyone cite docs/blogs where this choice is covered?

Manny Ju

Hi @Bradley Bartram​ -- thanks for posting this question. I'm glad you did because it's a common question amongs our clients. 😊

 

The decision whether to use contact tags versus subscribing to a new list depends entirely upon how you want to message to these people. Do you want to create a brand new message stream and then to manage subscription to this stream independently of your others? Do you just want to send specific email communications to these individuals but still manage their subscription to these comms as part of the same broader list?

 

If it's the former, then definitely add them to a new list. And if it's the latter, then continue the practice of keeping them subscribed to the general list and tag them accordingly so that you can target your emails to segments based on the contact tags.

 

Typically contact tags are used whenever you want to define a temporary state of your contacts. If it's something more permanent, then think about using custom fields.

 

The decision to add your contacts to an email list depends upon if you want to have a specific message stream to these individuals and to allow them to subscribe/unsubscribe independently of your other messages.