Higher Logic recommends that you institute a regular maintenance routine (perhaps monthly or quarterly) during which you do some necessary "housekeeping" in your Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional) account.
Consider that, just as all of the devices on your internet network combine to slow down the entire network, email lists in your account that are no longer used, but which are, for example, regularly syncing with an external system, can compromise your system's performance and possibly lead to "issues."
Issues can arise in any Thrive Marketing Professional account, integrated or otherwise. A cadence of regular maintenance improves your chances of catching issues early and, in some cases, possibly preventing them ever arising.
Email lists
In your Thrive Marketing Professional account, there are email lists associated with your Target Groups, Campaigns, and Landing Pages. It's a good idea to occasionally check these lists to make sure that they are still being used and are up to date.
As part of your maintenance, you can delete:
- outdated and invalid email addresses,
- email lists that are no longer used, and/or
- email lists that no longer pull information from an integrated AMS/CRM database.
This article describes how to check the email lists in your Target Groups and how to delete unwanted lists.
Target Groups
You should check your Target Groups to make sure that they are using email-address lists that are up to date.
- Access the Admin interface.
- Navigate to Contacts > Groups.
The Target Groups list page defaults to Main Folder and the list is sorted alphabetically on the Target Group Name column.
- Select All Folders from the folder dropdown in the upper right.
- Click the header of the Count column to sort the list on this column. (The "count" in this column is the number of contacts in the group.)
The list (as shown above) is now arranged by:
- groups that have errors,
- groups that have contacts who have not been counted,
- groups that have 0 contacts, and then
- all remaining groups listed in ascending (number of contacts) order.
TIP: You can click the column header again if you want to reverse the sort order.
Any group that has the word ERROR (in red text) requires immediate attention.
ERROR Target Groups
A Target Group can be in the ERROR state if, for example, a target group no longer exists in the AMS/CRM database and Thrive Marketing Professional is trying to sync with it, but cannot.
- Hover on the menu icon to the left of a Target Group and select Info.
Instead of the information that typically displays across several tabs on the overlay dialog, the Overview tab displays:
- Close the dialog and edit the Target Group to fix the error.
Queries and Compound Target Groups
Some of the groups might be Queries and some might be Compound Target Groups.
- Queries are requests that originate in an external, integrated (AMS/CRM) database and which sync information into your Thrive Marketing Professional account. These have to be fixed in that integrated database because it (not Thrive Marketing Professional) is considered the authoritative repository of your data.
- Compound Target Groups might have issues because they include the errored Queries or because they contain other Target Groups that have been deleted — in either your Thrive Marketing Professional account or your integrated database.
See Compound Target Groups to learn about their versatility and how to create them.
Other Target Groups to check
While you've got the list sorted and the count types grouped, it's a good idea to also check the groups that have Not Counted and 0 in the Count column; they probably also require attention.
Not Counted
This typically occurs for newly created Target Groups for which an authorized user/admin hasn't yet clicked the Info option in order to get a count.
0 count
There are a number of reasons why a Target Group's count is 0. Some of the more common ones are:
- All of the subscribers that were in the group no longer meet the criteria for the Target Group.
- If the Target Group is used for preference management or opt-outs and the subscribers have taken an action elsewhere (e.g., a Landing Page Form), they could have been removed from the Target Group.
- If it is a Compound Target Group, the logic could be setup incorrectly, in which case it would have to be corrected.
Campaigns
As long as you're doing some maintenance, check your Campaigns to ensure that:
- any queries being used in a Campaign are still working, and
- any automatic notifications in Campaigns (the Notify step) have valid email addresses.
Visit the Campaigns section of the knowledge base to manage your campaigns.
Landing Pages
If you have configured automatic notifications for a Landing Page, make sure that the email addresses are valid and up to date.
- Notifications are configured in the Notify section of the Process tab of a Landing Page.
To learn more, see Landing Pages Tabs.