This was originally posted in the Kartra (Official) Facebook group, and has helped hundreds of Kartra users to learn how to use Lists correctly!
Since not all of you are on Facebook, I wanted to re-post it here!
Just a reminder of a best practice for sending your emails.
Use Lists so that you can respect people’s unsubscribes.
If you are choosing “send to everyone in my database” in your recipients, you could be sending to Leads who have unsubscribed.
(Read: if you aren’t always cleaning out your “inactive” leads, you WILL be sending to leads who have unsubscribed.)
If you send recurring emails (like a newsletter) be sure to have a List just for that, and be sure the public name for it makes that obvious (ie – Danielle’s Weekly Newsletter).
Have a separate “primary list” that you add everyone to when they come in as a Lead and use that only for the really important stuff (ie – Danielle’s Important News and Updates).
This way if someone wants to stop getting my weekly newsletter they can easily unsubscribe from that List but still stay on my Important News and Updates list so they don’t miss the next big thing.
And, I don’t miss out on a connection with them because they had no other option but to unsubscribe from my one list.
You can even take an extra step, and if you’ve got something coming up that you’ll be promoting heavily (ie, a launch) create a launch list and add everyone from your master list onto it before the first email. Then send the emails only to the launch list, that way if people go to unsubscribe they’ll see the Great Big Launch list and be able to unsub from that while still sticking on your master list.
And regularly clean your Leads.
Go to Leads, click the three dots in the top right to filter, choose Status, Blacklisted, and then go to Action, Delete these Leads.
** You could also email support@kartra.com and request that they review those leads for whitelisting first, if you see some “good” leads mixed in there.
Once you hear back from support, you can delete those that didn’t pass.
These are the leads that will not receive any of your emails anyway – either they’re typos, dead emails, spam reports, etc.
Then filter for Status, Inactive.
Take a closer look at these.
Inactive means they aren’t on ANY Lists or Sequences.
This could mean that you haven’t added them to either yet – in which case you’ll want to be sure that going forward you are, adding them to either a Sequence or a List (possibly both).
But it could also mean that they have unsubscribed from everything and some could have marked you as spam.
If you are sending anything out to “everyone in my database” chances are that you’ll find some spam reports in your inactive leads.
It’s because they unsubscribed, but you kept sending to them.
Time to delete those as well. (Maybe export them to a csv to use as a custom audience for FB ad retargeting if you’re into that sort of thing ).
But better to be sending only to those who want to receive your emails and I know that some of you are just choosing “everyone in my database” because it comes up first and you didn’t realize it wasn’t the best option.
Hope this helps!
Best practice for sending your emails