Your contacts are the heart and soul of your business. arpReach allows you to collect details about your contacts and manage your communication with them in many ways.
Contact details can be sourced in various ways.
- completing a form on your website
- sending a “subscribe me” email
- adding individually within arpReach
- importing from CSV files (such as those produced by Excel)
- added automatically by other software (e.g., a shopping cart)
- added using the powerful arpReach API
Every contact is uniquely identified by its email address and no two contacts can have the same email address.
In this section, we discover how to use arpReach to add and manage your contacts, add them to autoresponders, create categories and tags, and how to segment your contacts into highly targeted micro-lists for better return on investment.
You can access all of the contact functionality from the menu bar by hovering over Contacts.
Each of the options available is covered in greater detail. Use the navigation links in the Contacts Section to the left of this page.
Contact Tags and Categories
You can create as many tags and categories for your contacts as you need. Each contact can have as many tags and belong to any number of categories.
For example, you might choose to have four categories:
- prospects
- customers
- interested in mountain climbing
- interested in dogs
You can assign as many of these categories to each contact as you wish or contacts need not belong to any categories – the choice is yours.
Assigning tags and categories to contacts is a great way to segment or group them so that you can target them with your messages.
For example, you might wish to send a discount offer to your “prospects” but not to your “customers”. By correctly assigning contacts to these categories, sending that message is straightforward.
Discover more about Tags and Categories
Subscriptions
A subscription is created when a contact is assigned to an autoresponder and each contact can have any number of subscriptions to one or more autoresponders.
Contacts do need to have any subscriptions and they can happily reside within your contact list without being subscribed to any autoresponders.
Most of the time, a contact will be subscribed to an autoresponder because you want the contact to receive that autoresponder’s follow-up message sequence.
“Categories, subscriptions, tracking tags and segments are all ways of grouping your contacts for easy targeting”
Tracking Tags
A tracking tag is a way of keeping track of the source of your subscribers. Suppose you have multiple websites with their own subscription forms with all of those forms feeding contacts into one autoresponder. By assigning a tracking tag to a form, you can track which form a subscription came from.
Tracking tags are assigned individually to a contact’s subscriptions and you can segment your list based on tracking tags.
Discover more about Tracking Tags
Segments
Segments are a very powerful feature of arpReach that allow you to select or group contacts based on a huge variety of criteria. Think of applying multiple “filters” to your entire list to either include or exclude contacts from the segment.
Segments are covered in a separate section of this guide.
“Create categories and tracking tags before adding contacts so they are available when you are ready to add contacts and subscriptions”