Contact Management
Full-featured contact management as standard
We offer a full suite of management features for handling your contacts and mailing lists.
- Create as many lists as you like.
- Upload your own lists.
- Download your lists.
- Download unsubscribes and bad email addresses to keep your own records up to date.
Smartmessages automatically deals with all the database management, de-duplicating addresses*, removing bounces, unsubscribes and spam reporters, adding new subscribers (including handling double-opt-in verification).
Bounces, unsubscribes and spam reporters are maintained in suppression lists (a.k.a. "Do not mail" lists) so that they will not inadvertently be added back on to lists via list uploads. You can also load suppression lists manually.
* We treat email addresses as unique identifiers because that may be the only data available, and it’s the only way that makes sense from a data protection point of view.
The One True List
One big feature of smartmessages is that we only keep a single record for each contact which may be linked to multiple lists.
This means your data stays sane and consistent, and you avoid the problems with duplicated and inconsistent records that other systems often suffer from, for example if someone changes their phone number, it’s reflected across all lists, not just one.
We provide a large set of standard fields for recording the kind of things that most lists contain – first name, last name, title, job titles, postcode etc. If you want more than that, we also provide 32 custom fields that can contain whatever you like.
When you upload a list, Smartmessages provides a downloadable list of invalid addresses, and also group addresses such as sales@, info@.
The data protection laws and marketing regulations recommend you do not send email to group lists because they may expose personal data to multiple people without the original user’s permission.
All of these features are of course also available through our API. You can use your contact list as a generic data store about your contacts, making it an ideal target for storing data obtained elsewhere, for example on custom landing pages or external data capture and web form systems (e.g. woofoo.com), so it will contain the most up-to-date data when you next do a mailing.