The Monkey with a Gun - The Problem of Not Being Able to Exclude Lists From a Campaign

D

Diego

Member
Hi Guys,

I really appreciate the progress that MailWizz is making. Really,

That said, let me highlight something, that can really mess up your data and
which can make you loose lots of valuable subscribers (buyers):

the lack of a "List Exclusion" feature.

"What's this MF?" (Let Me Remark The Important of This So You Get
a Real Dimension of What This Means For All of Us).

Suppose that you have the following lists:

- "Free Level" (people who subscribed to get a freebie).
- "Buyers" (people who purchased one or more of your product, even after getting your freebie).

We all know that your "Buyers" list is your biggest asset so, you won't email them
so frequently (you won't send them lots of offers) like you would do with your "Freebies"
list.

Now, in practical terms...you'll have BUYERS among your "freebies list/s" (because
they've purchased an OTO after getting the freebie or whatever).

Sending Campaigns Like a Monkey with a Gun...

When sending to your "Freebies" list, you need to exclude the subscribers who're on your "Buyers" list (subs in common).

Otherwise, many of your buyers will be getting those emails too!!

See? This practice is the ABC of email marketing here and in Africa...

...and this is is why Aweber, GetResponse (or any other Email Marketing tool
out there) implement this feature.

If you're not doing this, you're sending campaigns like a monkey with a gun.

630352-bigthumbnail.jpg


Understanding this is important if you have a business (i've used the
"Free" & "Buyers" lists example, but there are many other examples
where this applies).


The Way This Works With MailWizz: It Helps but Just to do 1 or 2 Promos....

MailWizz has the following approach...

MW allows you to create a third list from the 2 lists (like a static snapshot)
removing subscribers in common.

Example:

"Freebie List Excluding Buyers".

While this is ok, it's just a temp solution which doesn't help for the long
term. Here's why:

- It's a static list (which becomes old in days... or hours).
As your main 2 lists grow (or change - what is natural),
your third list remains intact (old).

- Bad Unsubscribes Management: If you wan to handle unsubscribes
(people who unsubscribe from this third list), you need to manually
create rules to also unsubscribe people from the other 2 lists.

- Statistics: As you're creating a third list, your statistics will be here
and there (instead of managing them from a single one).

- It's a mess. If you want to do this over and over to create lists
with the most recent subscribers (and without deleting previous
lists - lists that have been created this way in the past - so you
can process unsubscribes ), soon you'll have looots of merged
lists....

excludes.gif


....and with them, some of the problems that i've mentioned before.

A Dynamic "List Exclusion" feature the is what really works all around
the world (when you send a broadcast....you select which list/s to
exclude from your broadcast and you're ready to go).

See? You don't need to create separate lists etc. Just select
the list/s to be included/excluded and that's all.

Please, please, please.... pay attention to this feature.

Pray for it guys!
 
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@Diego kindly segment your subscriber based on 1 fields customer category values>>>>>> 1. free-customers, 2 . buyers

you can create 2 segments in your list based on these 2 values and then update those fields based in signups in free customers & buyers.

and then use this feature while sending the campaign.

i hope it will help.

Regards
 
Thanks Pradeep,

I already use segments (i guess that my buyers list has +3 of them).

But the problem is that i add subscribers via API, so (if i'm not wrong) i always have to add
them to some list (not to a segment).

Free Sub ---> Free List.
Buyer ---> Buyers List.

And i don't know if the people who use forms can add subscribers to a segment directly.

If you're not doing that automatically, doing it manually (one by one) would be insane.

Besides this, what's promising is that the "Includes" function is already implemented
so i guess that the opposite function ("Excludes") won't be that hard to
prepare.

I Keep praying for it :)
 
Last edited:
Lack of this feature is one of the huge drawbacks to using Mailwizz. It most definitely needs to be added, asap.
 
Diego said:
But the problem is that i add subscribers via API, so (if i'm not wrong) i always have to add
them to some list (not to a segment).
Click to expand...
That's not really true, i mean you just add them to the list, no matter the way you do, and the segments will update properly, no need for you to do anything else.

JacobJ said:
Lack of this feature is one of the huge drawbacks to using Mailwizz. It most definitely needs to be added, asap.
Click to expand...
You can still use segments till this will be added.

The main issue with adding this easily is because mailwizz is so centered around the idea of "lists" and the fact they should be so isolated.
This, combined with the fact we have customers with million subscribers and updating such apps so drastically isn't really the best choice, makes implementing the feature really difficult.
 
@twisted1919 –– thank you for the response.

Maybe there is another solution. It might help to have some context.

As an example, I have an email list of customers, and an email list of potential customers. I plan to run a 'webinar' that I'll promote to just the potential customers. So, that means I need to get people to sign up for all of the marketing material related to the webinar –– all of the webinar attendees will be getting a series of autoresponders, as well as regular campaigns, just related to the webinar. Some of these people will already be on the potential customers list, some will be brand new, and some will also be customers. Ideally, I'd like to avoid promoting the webinar to customers –– so the initial announcement should skip them.

Some of the customers are not on the potential customers list; some are.

Right now, when people sign up for a new list, I can choose where they go after signing up. Although, I think this would work much better if I could set this url in the html form, so it can easily be changed, depending on the context. This is something that could make a huge difference.

Right now, I've already sent out an announcement to the potential customers about the webinar. I'd like to send that announcement again, but this time excluding the people who already signed up, as well as excluding the customer list. I might send the customer list a different announcement about the same webinar, taking into account the different custom fields I have for that list.

I'm able to "sort of" do most of these things, via workarounds and custom programming, but it would be great if the software made it all happen automatically. Hopefully this helps.
 
Ha! Maybe I spoke too soon. I guess I'll have to fiddle with my setup a bit more. I tried adding a custom field, and marking all of the subscribers to a separate list in that field, so I could exclude them in a segment. Unfortunately, it appears that segment filtering only filters if there is a value set for the subscriber.

Which means...

Subscriber@example.com has a custom field called "webinar" set to "Attendee"

Subsciber@example.com doesn't have that custom field set to anything.

When I segment for the "webinar" custom field to NOT contain 'Attendee', I get no subscribers at all. Unless, those subscribers have that custom field set to something else. I tried setting a default value for that field, but it didn't fix the issue.

I'm using the API to update the custom field, but that is slow. (Around 1 subscriber per second.) I have 25,000 subscribers in that list. It would take 7 hours to loop through all of them. Plus the time spent programming the darn API.

Back to the drawing board. Uggghhh.
 
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