How Does Client Sense Help You Manage Contact Lists

In this article:

• Short answer
• Why it matters
• What this looks like in practice
• How to do it in Client Sense
• Turning the output into action
• Common pitfalls
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Short answer

Client Sense holds lists of contacts that build from your firm’s own communication rather than from manual entry. Static Favorite (Favourite) Lists are curated lists that doe not change. You decide who is on it, and it stays exactly as you left it until you change it. Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) Lists are defined by criteria and update themselves as contacts that match the criteria enter the platform. Either can be shared with colleagues, viewed for engagement, or exported for use in another system.

Why it matters

Lists are the raw material of marketing. Invitations, mailings, holiday cards, sector campaigns and client reviews all begin with the question of who should be on the list, and every one of them is degraded by a list that is wrong.

Many firms maintain lists in spreadsheets or CRM systems, which are accurate on the day they are built and decaying by the end of the month. People change jobs, titles change, contacts leave. The usual remedy is to ask partners to review their lists, which produces a small number of corrections from the people who were least busy and silence from everyone else.

The alternative is to derive the list from communication that is already happening. A contact who has emailed your firm this quarter is demonstrably current, and that fact needs nobody to confirm it.

What this looks like in practice

FRP Advisory, a national business advisory firm with more than 27 offices across the UK and Cyprus, describe reliable data as the thing at the heart of any marketing strategy. Their marketing team is lean and works across a broad range of services, so the ability to harness relationship data effectively and economically was the step they needed to take rather than one option among several.

Two details from their account are worth carrying into your own thinking. They had recently invested in a new CRM and did not want anything that would interfere with it, so the list capability had to complement what they already had rather than replace it. And they valued that the capture happens in the background without requiring staff to learn a new system or enter anything, which is what makes the underlying data trustworthy. Read the full account in the FRP Advisory case study.

A worked example most firms recognize: the holiday card list. Built once, edited annually by whoever remembers, and containing people who left three years ago. Derived instead from partners’ actual correspondence over the past year, it takes an afternoon and is right.

How to do it in Client Sense

Both kinds of lists are created the same way. Click + Add at the end of the row of tabs, and the Add List dialog asks which type you want. Full instructions for both are in How to Create and Manage Favorite (Favourite) Lists.

Building a Static Favorite (Favourite) List

A curated list that you assemble deliberately, which stays exactly as you left it.

Go to Favourites in the left-hand menu.

1. Click + Add at the right-hand end of the row of tabs.

2. In the Add List dialog, choose Favourite List.

3. Give the list a name, then save. You can also set an icon, a color and which columns the list displays.

The new list appears as a tab alongside your existing ones, ready to populate.

Building a Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List

1. Go to Favourites and click + Add.
2. In the Add List dialog, choose Dynamic List.
3. Name the list and save it. It appears as a tab in the same way a Static Favorite (Favourite) List does.

To set or change the criteria, right click the tab and choose Dynamic List Settings. This opens an editor with two tabs, Settings and Rules, and a Preview panel on the right showing the contacts that currently match, with a count.

Sharing a list

Lists can be shared with colleagues, which matters when several partners are jointly responsible for a set of relationships. See Sharing a Favorite (Favourite) List.

Full instructions for creating lists are in How to Create and Manage Favorite (Favourite) Lists.

Turning the output into action

A list is a working asset, not an artefact.

• Decide static or dynamic before you build. A fixed guest list for one dinner is a Static Favorite (Favourite) List. A sector mailing list is a Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List. The type is set at creation, so choosing wrongly means either constant maintenance or a list that changes under you.
• Give every standing list an owner. Someone has to be accountable for whether it is right, or nobody is.
• Sort exports before sending them to a partner. Sorting largest to smallest on the sent column puts their most active contacts at the top, which is the difference between a list they review and one they ignore.
• Use minimums to control size. Raising the minimum sent or received figure produces a shorter and more meaningful list. You can filter further once the file is open.
• Rebuild rather than edit. Where a list was derived from criteria, regenerating it is faster and more accurate than correcting last year’s copy.

Common pitfalls

• Leaving the date range at ninety days. Fine for finding active contacts, wrong for a holiday card list, which needs a year or more.
• Sorting on received only. It surfaces people who email your firm without your firm emailing back, which is misleading as a measure of relationship.
• Exporting to a spreadsheet and living there. The moment the list leaves the system it stops updating. Export for a purpose, not as a habit.
• Ignoring the Do Not Market column. It flags contacts your connected system records as unsubscribed. Sending to them anyway is both a compliance problem and an avoidable irritation.
• Building the same list repeatedly. If you are rebuilding something every quarter, it should be a Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the difference between a Static and a Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List?

A Static Favorite (Favourite) List is one you curate yourself. You choose who is on it and it stays that way until you change it. A Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List is defined by rules such as industry, job title or volume of contact, and its membership updates automatically as the underlying data changes. You choose which you want in the Add List dialog when the list is created.

Will adding the same person from two different partners create duplicates?

No. Adding a contact to the same list from more than one partner will not duplicate them, so you can work through partners in turn without cleaning up afterwards.

What do Minimum Sent and Minimum Received actually do?

They set how many emails must have passed in each direction within the period for a contact to appear. Raising either produces a shorter, more selective list. Five sent and one received is a sensible default.

Can other people see my lists?

Only if you share them. Both kinds of list can be shared with colleagues deliberately, which is worth doing where responsibility for a group of relationships is held across several partners.

Can we get a list of contacts who are not in our CRM?

Yes, where a CRM or email marketing system is connected. The export includes a column identifying which contacts also exist in that system, which makes the absences easy to isolate.