It’s a everyday problem: the number of subscribers increase, some lists become obsolete, new ones are created. The risk is to end up with a messed up subscriber database.
The Newsletter plugin offers few massive tools to clean up and reorganize subscribers. Let’s see some examples of actions you can take. Some tools requires the latest Newsletter plugin version.
Move all subscribers from list A to list B
It may happens you grew two lists, maybe using the retargeting option of the Reports Extension or separated subscription forms. But finally, there is no more reason to keep the lists separated and you want to merge them in a single one.
We want to remove list B and move all its subscribers to list A. First be sure to not refer list B in any of your forms.
Then enter the Maintenance panel of the Subscriber menu and use the tool “[move] subscribers of [list B] to [list A]”. The square brackets represent fields where you can select one or more options.
Note that subscribers originally in list A are not touched and if a subscriber in list B was already in list A, he will just be removed from the list B. Those examples explain why the number of subscribers on list A could not be exactly the sum of the original list A and list B.
Now the list B should be empty and you can change its configuration.
Delete or target inactive subscribers
First, inactive subscribers are people not interacting with your newsletter in a configured time window. For example you can decide that if in the past six months a subscriber didn’t open or clicked a newsletter, he is inactive.
Newsletter tracks the subscribers activity and store the last activity timestamp.
To target inactive subscribers you can prepare a temporary list where to collect them. With the tool “inactive since [time] add to [list]” you can link all those subscribers to your new list.
Then you can run a campaign to recall them or just delete them all.
Recall inactive subscribers
In the last example we saw how to target inactive subscribers. When the recall campaign has been sent, the list with inactive subscribers could contain active users. If you want to run a second campaign or decide to delete who has not responded to your recall, you need to repopulate the list collecting the inactive subscribers. Hence:
- unlink all the subscriber from your list for inactive users using the “deactivate” button
- rerun the tool to associate to that list the inactive subscribers
Newsletter plugin has not yet an autopopulated list with inactive subscribers.
Definitively delete subscribers in a list
If you have a list collecting a set of subscribers you want to completely delete, use the “delete” button applied to that specific list. Deletion cannot be reversed!
Delete contacts that cannot be contacted
Overtime the database could grow with useless contact: not confirmed, bounced or unsubscribed contacts. They are never considered by Newsletter when running campaigns so if you want to free up some space you can delete them. All those operations are definitive, no way back!