• Recording data for hard bounces, soft bounces, etc. to sync to your CRM
• Changing a specific field value for every record in a segment
• Injecting campaign scores into a segment
• Incrementing a field to count every time a behavior occurs.
• Setting a timezone on a contact record
• Recording a date when a contact's status changes

List Maintenance Programs accomplish many of the same functions as Automated Programs, which can also change a field.   Automated Programs generally run once on a contact, and should be used if you want a field to change one time and not be updated (such as the original lead source).   List Maintenance programs can run on a schedule and update daily for data that changes regularly (such as campaign score).   In addition, List Maintenance has more options for setting field values, including campaign score, timezone, increment, decrement, or clearing the field value.

Best Practices for List Maintenance programs:  Because these programs can run daily, it's best to limit the source to contacts who really need action to be taken. For example, if you want to update contact records to add a timezone, create a source segment of contacts with a blank timezone field. This will limit the amount of processing the program has to do and will only update contacts who need it.

Instructions

Create a New Program

1. Navigate to Automation > List Maintenance Programs and click the '+' New Program button on the right.
2. Enter a Program name and description for the List Maintenance Program.
3. Select your schedule, Manually or On a schedule. Scheduled programs can run daily, weekly, or monthly.  Best practice: Run list maintenance programs during off-business hours (when you are not sending emails).
4. Click Continue:
   
5. Select your source segment. This is the set of contacts you want to run through the program.  Only one segment can be selected for each program.
   
   

Add Steps to Your Program

1. Click Add a step and enter a step name.
2.  Expand the Change field value option:
   
3. Choose the field to update:
4. Enter a value, or choose an option from the drop-down list.  Options include:
   • Set Value to (and enter a value).  The value must match the data type of the selected field (i.e. if the field is numeric, boolean, or date, the value entered must conform to this).  Use the personalization icon to insert data from other fields, for example {{First}} {{Last}} to populate Full Name, or use the CRM fields to populate data from Account or Owner tables
   • Clear the value
   • Decrement value by
   • Increment value by
   • Set value to behavioral score 
   • Set value to campaign score
   • Set value to today's date
   • Set value to timezone
   • Assign a unique number in the list (starting with 1)
   Tip:  If you sync to a CRM, you don't need to use List Maintenance to set the behavior score fields, this will be done automatically before each CRM sync as long as your fields are mapped.
5. Choose to either apply to all contacts in the program or only contacts that also belong to a particular segment:
   
   
   The change field step will overwrite existing data in the field, so you may wish to segment your contacts first to change only blank field data.
6. Add more steps, or save your program.
   
   

Managing Your Programs

Point to a program in the list to run it manually, edit it, favorite it, move it to a different folder, or delete it. You can use folders and tags to keep your programs organized.

Use the 'info' hover button to see information about the program, including when it last ran: