The List Manager
In email marketing, who you send an email to is just as important as what you send. Using the List Manager, you manage contact lists and, using segments, create recipient lists that target a particular audience based on profile or engagement data. Then, using the Email Experience Manager, you create targeted email campaigns with output that is relevant and personal to the recipients.
You open the List Manager from the Sitecore Launchpad.
List types
In the List Manager, there are two types of lists:
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Contact list – a standard list that contacts can be members of. A contact can be a member of one or more contact lists.
When you create a new contact list, you can use existing contact lists as building blocks for the new list that together make up a specific target group. For example, you can create a list called North America - Customers, from two existing contact lists: US - Customers and CA - Customers.
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Segmented lists – a list that is a filtered list of one or more selected contact lists. The contacts in a segmented list are not actually members of the list - they only appear in the list if they are in the list source (the selected contact lists) and they meet the conditions that you define.
A segmented list is a dynamic list that updates continually when the contacts in the sources of the list meet the defined conditions.
You can convert a segmented list to a new contact list. This allows you to take a "snapshot" of the segmented list and create a new contact list with the contacts that meet the defined conditions at the time of conversion.
List source
When you create a list in the List Manager, you can choose to create an empty contact list or you can choose a source of the list:
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For contact lists, a list source can be any existing contact list.
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For segmented lists, a list source can be all the Sitecore contacts or an existing contact list.
Only contact lists can be used as a list source. If you want to use a segmented list as a list source, you must first convert the segmented list to a contact list.
Exclusions
It is also possible to exclude certain contact lists from your sources to modify the list source. This allows you to further shape your target group. For example, you can target the USA customers in a North America list, by excluding a Canada customers list.
You can also use exclusions for quality assurance purposes, for example to exclude unsubscribed customers.
Contact list definitions appear in the index only when they are activated using the Marketing Operations API or they are saved with the activated flag set to True.
manager.SaveAsync(contactList, true);
Alternatively, if a contact list is created but not activated, you can activate it as part of the workflow by changing the Draft state to Deployed.