Are your email lists growing?  If so, you’re among the majority of marketers, according to Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark survey.   Despite the doom and gloom in the economy lately the majority of respondents appear to have not lost considerable portions of their email lists over the last year.

Here’s the better question, do you know which portion of your list is good? Do you keep accurate record of what has bounced, who has unsubscribed or what companies have shut down? You should, those numbers impact your email campaigns in so many ways that it is key to keep tabs on the changes.  One easy way to do that is with a ‘Lead/Contact Status’ field on your records.  If you’re working in Salesforce.com they make it very easy as this field already exists as a standard field on Lead Records, now you just need to go in and customize the picklist!

Some of the types of things we have as possible Lead Status’ at ReachForce are:

Open
Bounce Back
Additional Followup needed
Mtg – continue marketing
Mtg – additional follow up needed
Mtg – no interest, no fit
Wrong Contact: NLT
Company No Fit: Closed/Acquired
Company No Fit: No interest/need
Company No Fit: See desc. Notes
Wrong Contact: See Comp. No Fit Notes
Unsubscribed

As you can see, our status field covers a range of things that are important to our sales team and some that are important to only our marketing team.  We use these fields to determine who to continue to pull into marketing campaigns and who to put into a file to Refresh (aka send through our process that phone verifies whether the person is still there, whether they fill the role we need and whether we have the right contact info for them).

We have also employed this type of dispositioning on our Contact records by creating a custom field.  For us, if something has made it to the Contact stage it has been qualified, we know that they are a fit for us, etc. so there’s no need to have some of the same status types and we narrowed down the list of statuses to the following:

Good
Email Bounce
Company Closed/Acquired/Bankrupt
No Longer There
Unsubscribed

Keeping these statuses updated is a two-fold responsibility….our sales team updates them as they call or have meetings/appointments with different people and our marketing team updates them as we have bounce backs or unsubscribes that we can track from Eloqua.   Overall, we have found this status field on our records to be an indispensible piece to keeping our email lists up to date.