Welcome to the third installment of ReachMail Piece by Piece. I hope that our first two editions were helpful. If you haven’t read them yet, you can brush up on you’re reporting skills here and your list management skills here.

This week we’re discussing control.

Did you know that you can create multiple ReachMail users and set the areas of your ReachMail account that they have access to? You didn’t? Well you can, and you should. Seriously, if you have multiple users logging in with one ID I strongly recommend that after you read this post you go create individual logins for each of them.

User access controls feature a high degree of customization. Just about any configuration you can think of is possible in the user controls. Want a user who can only run reports? No problem. How about one who can only access the image library and upload lists? Can do. A user who can only access specific list? Absolutely. You can even remove mail approval access for a user. They can schedule a mail but it needs your approval to be delivered. And of course you can also designate a user as another account administrator.

You can find the user management tools in the Account Manager tab and you can watch a short video here.

And as always, if you have any questions or concerns that you’d like to discuss with me directly, you can find me at dnielsen@reachmail.com

Welcome to the second edition of ReachMail Piece by Piece. If you missed the first installment click here to take a look back (it’s a handy tip about generating follow-up lists for your campaigns).

This week we’re going to talk about List Sweeper. This topic always brings up some best-practices questions so I’ll try to answer some of those today.

A common question the support staff gets is “How do I remove opt-outs or hard bounces from a list?”

Before we get to the answer, a little background on hard bounces and opt-outs. Hard bounces and opt-outs are the inactive records in the list. Either the users have made themselves inactive (opt-out) or the address was determined to be invalid (hard bounce). For the more detailed description of hard bounces, soft bounces, opt-outs and how ReachMail handles them please read this post.

So, to get back to the original question about how to remove hard bounces and opt-outs from a list my answer is usually this: Why do you want to remove them?

I know it’s not polite to answer a question with a question but in this case I think it’s useful to discuss exactly what goal we’re trying to accomplish by culling these records from the list.

As an aside, keep in mind that inactive records are NOT delivered and therefore have no bearing on the volume which is used to calculate your bill.

We always encourage people to leave the inactive records in the list because they provide valuable historical records. When you upload new records to a list the uploaded records are automatically checked against the existing list, any hard bounces and opt-outs will not be added to the list. If the inactive records had been removed that history is lost and any hard-bounces would have to run through the entire bounce process again before they would be marked as inactive.

That said, if you do want to clean your list of any or all inactive records, there’s a tool for that. It’s called List Sweeper and you can find it in the Action menu of any list. Just select List Sweeper, choose what type of inactive records you would like to remove and click the Sweep List button.

If you have any questions or if you’re wondering if List Sweeper is right for you, feel free to contact me a dnielsen@reachmail.com

Next in Piece by Piece: Controlling User Access

Welcome to the first installment of ReachMail: Piece by Piece. Piece by Piece? (Yes, that’s a working title).

The goal of this weekly series is to provide some informal education on different areas and functions of ReachMail. In some posts we’ll focus mainly on best practices and others will shed some light on some little used ReachMail functions and tools. Hopefully, you’ll learn something new or get some creative ideas about how to best use ReachMail to enhance your business.

So have fun and if you have any questions feel free to use the comments section or to reach me directly at dnielsen@reachmail.com. Now on to this weeks topic…

Create a New List of Recipients who Clicked on a Link.

That’s a mouthful, huh? I get asked this question a lot: How do I contact the people who’ve clicked on a link in my recent mailing(s)?

Well it’s easy actually, there’s a tool right in the individual mailing report to help you do just that.

In an individual mail report look all the way to right of any tracked link summary. You’ll see two icons, an eyeball and a document . Clicking on the document item will create a new list of only those recipients who clicked on that link.

The new list carries over the full record from the source list, so any information you have for that record (phone, zip code, industry) will be available in the new list.

Here’s a video of the whole process in action: List From Clicks

As always, if you’ve got any questions, you can reach us at support@reachmail.com or find me directly at dnielsen@reachmail.com.

Next Week: List Sweeper