Lists

Sailthru uses lists to create groups of subscribers that you can email and track the growth of.

There are a few different types of lists: primary lists, secondary lists, and Smart Lists. Sailthru sends to primary and secondary lists in order of engagement levels, sending to most engaged/active users first.

When you create a new list for the first time, by default it is secondary. You can change it to primary by checking the box on the lefthand side in the Lists page.

You can manually upload a list of email addresses in CSV or TXT file. If it's a TXT file, it must be UTF-8. The first header of either file should be "email." If you have variables such as first name, last name, zip code, the rest of the headers can be called the name you want in our system as long as they're consistent and lowercase (e.g. first name and first_name are considered different variables).

Please note that source variables (which you can set up to communicate with the Source Signup Report) will require a var name of "source" and must be all lowercase.

Primary lists are your main lists of subscribers. They will be tracked in the List Growth report, and belonging to this list means they count towards your overall subscriber total. Generally, lists that are sent to on a consistent basis should be marked as primary.

Usually, you will create one primary list per separate email newsletter that you are sending.

You can have up to 50 primary lists. If you need more, contact support.

Secondary lists are lists that don't count towards your overall subscriber total. You might, for instance, want to upload a suppression list – a list of emails that you got from an advertiser that you don't want to send to. You should leave this list as Secondary so it won't count towards your subscriber total and throw off your reports.

Secondary lists are especially useful for:

• suppression lists
• temporary ad-hoc lists
• internal or dev-team lists
• user-generated lists

After your initial setup, it's more common to deal with secondary lists, so secondary lists are the default state of newly created lists.

Smart Lists are dynamically generated lists that automatically update according to particular criteria. For example, you could create a Smart List of all of your users in New York who are interested in technology.

Because Smart Lists are dynamic, you cannot directly add or remove members from them. You can only indirectly add or remove users by updating their underlying data.

You can use Smart Lists as a form of "list segmentation", but you can also use them to blend multiple lists, search for user interests across your entire subscriber base, and more.

To create a Smart List, use the Query Builder and construct the query of your choice.

Please note that while primary and secondary lists send campaigns on order of engagement, smart lists with multiple or no source lists do not.