Idea
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Marketing to Contacts without Names?

I am curious if anyone in the community has found a good approach for marketing to contacts (or leads) that have no names but only email addresses?  The business case is that you have people sign up for say newsletters via a landing page, but you will not be collecting any first, last or full name, just an email address.  The system is setup to send marketing emails to contacts, and by default, the platform requires a full name for contact (a lead does not require a full name).  I am wondering how one would go about marketing via campaigns to these newsletter sign ups?  Change the system to allow no name?  Could complicate things with duplicate efforts etc…   Leverage leads and find a way for the campaigns audience to consume these leads?  Not sure if possible.   Or an entire custom package for collecting and sending emails and access

Steve

2 comments

Dear Stephen,

To be able to send the emails after the lead is created, a contact must be created. But if you do not want to collect such info or add some fields that are requiered for contact creation, you can simply set some default values to these fields.

For example, you can set the default values for the lead cell like Contact name. Then it is not obligatory to add this field to your landing.

Otherwise, you can set the default values for the contact on the object level through the configuration:

In such a way it won't be obligatory to get the full name of the contacts to be filled in on the landing page.

Best regards,

Lily

 

Lilly,

True, I figured could that, however, I can see that using default values could impact duplication efforts or make them more complicated.  e.g. 100-2000 contacts with a full name of "No Name".  Additionally the data and it's intergerity become harder to work with especially mixed with real contact values.  Even allowing name as optional at the contact level (another thought I had), is uninviting per the same reasoning.

I guess I am basically trying to create a subscription list mutually execlusive of contacts.  I figured this would be a unique customization to create a subscriber list object.  the question is how.

I know the audience for campaigns is tied to contacts, so is it possible for the campaign emailing functionality to point a new object like that for emails as an audience via customization?  Or am I looking at cloning a lot of the campiagn features to create a separate "campaign" setup just for subscriptions?  The end result would be sending emails out through the same email service...under the campaign section or a new subscription section.

Steve

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