LIST CLEANUP

Jake Patoski

Training & Learning Manager

• Intro• Deduplicate supporters• Correct/remove misformatted emails• Query for people missing email address• Remove people who haven’t opened/clicked an

email• Remove unsubscribed supporters• A quick note on Scoring• Deleted supporters - what happens on the other

side?

Agenda

• Keeping your list free of clutter, duplicates, and dead weight is important.

• A tidy list can result in tangible benefits:• Accurate reporting• Increased open rates• Decreased bounce rates

• List cleanup can be done weekly, monthly, or quarterly, but at the very least, do a cleanup annually.

• The tools and methods below can be taken on individually, or combined to do the most thorough cleanup job.

Introduction

Deduplicate Supporters

• Supporter Management -> Manage Supporters -> Deduplicate Supporters

• Select the fields to deduplicate on• More fields, higher threshold• Certain fields are more unique: email

> first and last name > first name• Deduplicate by each Individual match

or in a Batch

• Factors to consider when deciding whether and which records should be merged:• Receive Email value - data might be older, but who cares if that address

is still subscribed!• Last Modified - even if less complete data set, recency may be more

important• Completeness of data - is it more helpful to have a full address over an

email address? or vice versa?• Primary record’s data will be retained; Secondary record’s data will be

merged into Primary. (Ignore if the records are not duplicates.)• Merged/deduplicated supporters cannot be unmerged or re-duplicated.

Deduplicate supporters

• Arises from data entry error.• This query uses the Salsa wildcard character %.• If a supporter's email field doesn't follow the

format of username + @ + domain + . + top-level domain, then they're not receiving email!

• Can you fix these emails? Or just delete them?

Correct/remove misformatted emails

• These are usually offline supporters who have been imported.

• Before doing anything, make sure you know how your organization uses the Salsa database – just online, or your primary database?

• What to do with the results?• Decide if you might be able to find their email

elsewhere• Add these records to a suppression group• Delete these records

Query for people missing email address

• What are we doing here? These queries find supporters who haven’t opened/clicked an email since a specific date.

• What’s your criteria? 1 year for clicks, 6 months for opens? • You can always hope these supporters snap out of it… but if

it’s been a while, it might be time to say goodbye.• Or add them to a group that is usually suppressed.• Or reach out to them specifically and ask why.

Remove people who haven’t opened/clicked an email

• This is an easy one – if they’re already not receiving your emails, why are they still on your list?

• You may want to only delete specific unsubscribe types.• Or just suppress them.

Remove unsubscribed supporters

A quick note on scoring

• The Scoring package allows you to assign a quantitative score to your supporters based on their activities.

• Scoring is more proactive, though slightly less specific.

• Two parts:• A score

• The ‘container’ for scoring entries (can be one or more scores combined)

• Fields:• Name• Description• Status

• Scoring entries

Scoring entries • A ‘rule’ to score by• Reference Name• Scoring category – usually ‘Normal’ but

‘Fixed Value’ could be used to tally total donations

• Object – can be hard to decide which! Feel free to contact support@

• Multiplier – points per ___ (such as action taken, donations made, etc)

• Expiration – not to be mixed up with halflife; after this amount of time, the point value will reduce to the minimum value. Should scores reset after a year? Then 365.

• Minimum value – as a score ‘decays’ because of halflife or expiration, this will be the ‘floor’ of the score

• Halflife – less sudden than expiration, the score will decrease incrementally – after X days, the score will decrease by half.

The bolded entries on the right are the only required fields for a complete score.

Common objects –

Supporter - award points to supporters for signing up to your list in the first place. Consider pairing this with a quick expiration time, like 10-60 days. Some organizations consider new supporters to be at an inherently high level of engagement.

Donation - award points for each donation made (regardless of the size of the gift)

Supporter Action - award points for each online activism action taken (petitions and targeted advocacy campaigns, including write-your-rep actions)

Supporter Event - award points for each event registered for.

• A deleted supporter is not lost forever.

• Re-use the previous queries, but check the box.

• No data is lost when a supporter is deleted, so you can also query for a group (or put your supporters in a group before you delete them).

Deleted supporters - what happens on the other side?

• List cleanup recommendations are all over the web – go Googling!• Queries & Deduplication

• https://help.salsalabs.com/entries/22537388-Query-and-Export• https://help.salsalabs.com/entries/22524893-Deduplicate-Supporters

• Discussions on list cleanup on Commons • https://help.salsalabs.com/entries/22484806-How-do-you-get-rid-of-bad-email-ad

dresses-in-Salsa-

• https://help.salsalabs.com/entries/22494788-Automated-deduplication-hackery• Deliverability

• https://help.salsalabs.com/entries/22421542-Bounce-Processing• https

://help.salsalabs.com/entries/22010355-How-to-Prepare-for-Yahoo-s-Release-of-Inactive-Email-Accounts

• http://www.salsalabs.com/support-community/blog/yahoo-gives-1-more-reason-remove-inactive-emails

• https://help.salsalabs.com/entries/21768904-What-s-new-with-Gmail• Scoring

• https://help.salsalabs.com/entries/22537438-Scoring

Further Salsa reading

THANK YOU!

Contact Info・Read, learn, discuss – help.salsalabs.com・Training & Learning Team –

training@salsalabs.com・Salsa Support – support@salsalabs.com