The Rapid Evolution of Affino's Contact Lists

Affino’s Contact Lists have become the heart of audience profiling and targeting within Affino. Clients have anything between half-a-dozen lists to well over a hundred thousand.

Contact Lists are the way Affino universally manages lists of contacts throughout Affino, whether they be marketing target lists, customer service contacts, sales leads, or trainees.

This ubiquity means that you can get closer to your audience with Affino than any other audience CRM.

Recent Updates to Contact Lists

Recent releases have seen a host of significant updates to Contact Lists including:

• Topic driven lists, which automatically include or exclude members based on their interests
• Permission based contact lists which track groups of users based on the permissions they give you
• The ability to tightly control who can manage a list, and see the contacts on each list
• Dedicated Task and Contact Note tracking on each contact list
• Being able to specify which columns you want on each contact listing
• A great number of improved methods for automatically adding contacts to lists, with the continued addition of new Conversion Event triggers, and the enhanced ways Affino is able to identify users
• New filters on the lists allow you to identify users open to marketing, your own personal contacts, and a wide number of other targeting options
• New easy to use contact list workflows created by defining your own statuses on each contact list

It’s the last one in particular which takes Contact Lists to the next level.

Statuses - Turbo Charging your Contact Lists

By being able to set your own custom statuses on Contact Lists, and by defining the columns you want to see, you can now create everything from targeted Lead Gen lists, through to Event management and Support driven contact workflows on the fly.

An example Lead Generation workflow might have the following statuses:

• New Lead
• Qualified Lead for Follow-up
• Opportunity Generated
• Not Relevant

A basic Event Attendee list, connected with an ad hoc sign-up form might include the following statuses:

• Prospective Attendee
• Registered Attendee
• Confirmed Attendee
• VIP Attendee
• Sent Attendee Pack
• Sent VIP Attendee Pack
• Not Relevant

Other lists could be for training, GDPR, Editions, production workflows, and much more.

Targeting by Contact Lists

The dynamic nature of Topic, Conversion Event, and Permission driven lists means that these are living entities that constantly update based on your audience’s activites and provide the best means of segmenting them on a real-time basis.

We are constantly improving your ability to target campaigns by contact lists. In the past it was possible simply to include contacts based on list membership, now it’s possible to set up multiple inclusion and exclusion lists when creating message campaigns, messages and other contact lists.

Presenting Lists on the Display Side

We have been continually enhancing how you can present Contact Lists in Affino to your audiences. The introduction of the Contact List DE was a major step forward, and allowed you a great deal of flexibility when presenting any list.

The next Affino release allows you to take this forward a great deal, with the introduction of Display side Editions. These can be both Simple and Advanced. Simple Editions allow you to display a single list of contacts, e.g. Hot 100, whilst Advance Editions let you mix together lists of Contacts, Companies and Articles in any combination.

Similar to Events, once you have your Skin in place, adding and updating lists can be done by anyone without any advanced design skills.

Where Next for Contact Lists

We are looking to greatly improve how you can analyse by contact lists, with Persona based Dashboards. Multiple enhancements to the Analysis tab on each Contact List, so you can see the latest catalogue items purchased by list members, as well as insight on the overall spend of members in each list.

We will also be adding more Contact List filters throughout Affino so that you can segment most reports by contact lists, as well as the existing Account and individual Contact filters. This will provide greatly improved insight into group behaviours.

Let us know how you think we can further enhance these to drive forward your audience engagement.