Creating and Managing Direct Mail Lists
You use List Manager to create and manage lists of direct mail recipients. There are two types of lists: generic lists and mailing lists. Generic lists are lists imported into List Manager from the Reports module, the Segment Viewer module, a SQL Server table, or an ASCII text file. List Manager automatically attempts to convert generic lists into mailing lists if they contain rows of e-mail addresses. Mailing lists are used by Direct Mailer to create and send pieces of mail to selected recipients in the list. If the generic list does not contain e-mail addresses, the list is imported as a user list if the format requirements are met. For more information about mailing list formats, see Mailing List Formats.
After the lists are imported into List Manager, you can use them to run Direct Mailer jobs to target your users more successfully. For example, you can run reports that show you the characteristics and past behavior of your users, and then create a direct mail campaign to target advertisements or products to those users.
You can also use List Manager to export lists to a file or SQL Server database, add or subtract lists, copy lists, extract lists, and delete lists.
Create a List of Recipients
Process a List of Recipients
Create a List of Recipients
To create a list of recipients for a direct mail campaign, you use the List Manager module in Campaigns. Lists are created in List Manager by importing lists created by other applications, such as Microsoft SQL Server (to create a SQL table), Notepad (to create an ASCII text file), Microsoft Excel (to create a spreadsheet) or Microsoft Outlook (to create .pst files that contain messages, appointments, contacts, and other Outlook items).
You can generate a list of recipients from analysis reports, Segment Viewer, or from an external database, and then import that list to the List Manager. For information about importing a list into List Manager, see Importing and Exporting Lists.
Process a List of Recipients
To process a list of recipients, Direct Mailer firsts loads the list of recipients from List Manager into a job table. It then iterates through the list of users, sending the data about the recipients through the Direct Mailer pipeline.