How To Store Addresses in LISTSERV Maestro (and use them as recipients of a message)

You can make the best use of Maestro's features if you store your recipients' addresses and profiles (like names, hobbies, customer numbers, etc.) directly in Maestro itself.

The Subscriber Warehouse is the topmost organizational unit where the recipient email addresses and further subscription profile data is stored. It acts as the repository for all subscribers and also allows subscriber profile management by you (in your role as the data administrator) and (to a configurable extent) by the subscribers themselves.

List Groups and Standalone Subscriber Lists are the main organizational units in the Maestro Subscriber Warehouse and offer three very important functions:

Public Subscriber Website: Each list group automatically provides a set of public pages, allowing users to subscribe, to manage subscription settings and (very important) to unsubscribe.

Note: Even if you configure the subscriber website to not be publicly accessible, users can still unsubscribe via the special *UnsubscribeURL drop-in, which is why you should always be aware of the public subscriber website and its layout. See Website Customization for details.
Unique Subscriber Accounts: Maestro automatically associates each subscriber that is registered in a list group (or standalone subscriber list) with a unique subscriber account, and the uniqueness is defined through the subscription address. Such a subscriber account is always associated with a password, which, depending on the website settings, is defined by the subscriber during the subscription process or not. This password is stored in the form of a secure hash (following recent security principles) and this hash is used to verify the password input during login.

Note: Uniqueness applies only within the list group, this means that the same user from the Internet can in fact have several subscriber accounts in several list groups of your subscriber warehouse, all using the same personal email address. This alone may help you decide if you plan to actually have multiple list groups in your subscriber warehouse, because this automatically means that the same user (identified by the same personal email address) may have multiple login accounts, each associated with a different list group.
Shared Profile Fields and Container for Subscriber Lists: A list group automatically acts as container for at least one Subscriber List, usually for more than one. It also allows you to define profile fields already on group level, these fields are automatically shared by all lists in the group. The EMAIL profile field is the first such field, but you can add as many additional shared profile fields to the group if you like, for example to store subscriber names. By acting as container for multiple subscriber lists, list groups also offer the ability to send to multiple lists at once, namely those that are contained in the group.

A Subscriber List, be it a standalone list or contained in a list group, is what users from the Internet actually subscribe to and what you, when sending marketing messages in the form of Maestro mail jobs, pick as desired target audience, optionally filtered via a condition on the profile fields or by using a segment. A user's email address can be subscribed to any of the lists in your subscriber warehouse, even to multiple lists at once. But it can only be registered once in a given list group (see the text about uniqueness above).

If at this point you are asking yourself how you should employ this structure for your own lists, and how to decide which list groups and lists to create, and how to combine lists into groups, then please be patient. This will be explained in more detail a bit further below. For now, let us first continue with a description on how to actually create list groups and subscriber lists, and how to use them:

To create a new list group, select the Subscriber Lists node on the subscriber lists overview in the subscriber warehouse tree on the left. Then select New Subscriber List In New List Group... from the menu (or go via the right-click menu of the subscriber lists node in the subscriber warehouse tree).

Maestro List Groups combine several Subscriber Lists so that these lists can share:

Profile Fields: Defining a profile fields for the list group means that this field is automatically available for all lists in the group. Subscribers who edit their list profiles will (usually) always also see and (usually) be able to edit the values of profile fields that are shared via the list group. The field input types Hidden and Read Only are also available for shared profile fields, which is why a shared field may not be visible or not be editable for a subscriber, exactly as a list-specific profile field would be. The EMAIL field is by definition always a shared field of the list group and is available for all lists.
Unique Subscriber Accounts: Each subscriber of a list in a list group is associated with exactly one record that is stored on list group level. This record (stored in the Maestro system database) carries not only the values of the shared profile fields and in particular the subscriber's email address, but also additional important system information such as for example the secure hash of the subscription password.

In other words: A Maestro list group acts very similar to a login area with "members only" access.

For marketing messages sent with mail jobs, a list group offers the additional benefit of being able to send to multiple lists at once, depending on choices that you make in the recipients wizard.

On this screen (which is tailored to the special case of creating a list group) you define the name of the group. As usual, the name of the list group must not conflict with the names of other list groups (or standalone lists). You can easily change the name of the list group later.

A very important setting is the choice of First List in Group: Since list groups must always contain at least one list, picking a value here is mandatory. You can choose from the currently existing Standalone Lists in your subscriber warehouse. Lists that are already contained in a list group are not shown.

(If you later want to have additional lists in the group, you do this by first selecting the list group from the subscriber lists tree and then selecting New In List Group Subscriber List from the menu.)

After having selected the first list in the group, Maestro shows an overview of the selected list's profile fields. You can now decide if you want to Move the field to the group level or if you want to Keep the field in the list. This gives you an easy method to define the initial collection of shared profile fields in your group. Note: Maestro will physically move any data associated with fields for which you pick the Move choice to the list group's database table. This procedure is performed automatically when you click the [OK] button but may take some time, depending on the volume of data that must be moved.

Once created, the settings of an existing list group are managed in the List Group Definition wizard.

To create a new subscriber list in an existing list group, select the desired parent list group in the subscriber warehouse tree, then select New -> Subscriber List from the menu. The definition of a new subscriber list as well as editing the settings of an existing list happens in the Subscriber List Definition wizard.

Once your list group (or subscriber list) is created, you can then populate it with subscribers. You can either add subscribers manually, one by one (menu Edit -> Add Subscriber). Or you can import subscribers from an external source (a spreadsheet file, text file, from a database or an LDAP directory) with the Subscribers Importer.

With your list group and subscriber list populated, you can now browse through the list of List Subscribers, which also allows you to search/filter, edit, download or delete the existing subscribers. You can also save your search filters as predefined Subscriber List Segments.

The final step is to then use your subscribers as the recipients of a Mail Job. For this, you can either create a new mail job that is pre-populated with the desired recipients, or you can edit the recipients definition of an existing mail job, to target one of your subscriber lists or list groups:

To create a new mail job that is sent to all subscribers of a subscriber list or list group:
- Select from the menu:
  
  Subscriber Warehouse.
  
  This opens the Maestro Subscriber Warehouse
- In the Subscriber Lists section, select the desired subscriber list or list group.
- With the subscriber list selected, select from the menu:
  
  All List Subscribers New Mail Job With These Recipients....
  
  This creates a mail job with a completed recipients definition, ready to proceed with defining the message (or, if you would like to refine or change the recipients filtering condition further, you can use the method described below for existing mail jobs).
To create a new mail job that is sent to only some subscribers of a subscriber list or list group:
- Select from the menu:
  
  Subscriber Warehouse.
  
  This opens the Maestro Subscriber Warehouse
- In the Subscriber Lists section, select the desired subscriber list.
- With the subscriber list selected, use the search/filter options in the subscribers table that is shown in the right pane to search for exactly those subscribers that are supposed to be the recipients of the job.
- When you are satisfied with your filtering condition, select from the menu:
  
  Filtered List Subscribers New Mail Job With These Recipients....
  
  This creates a mail job with a completed recipients definition, ready to proceed with defining the message (or, if you would like to refine or change the recipients filtering condition further, you can use the method described below for existing mail jobs).
To define the recipients of an existing mail job to be sent to all subscribers of a dataset, subscriber list or segment:

On the mail job's Workflow page, click the "Define Recipients" step and on the Source page, make sure that the "Send to Recipients in the Subscriber Warehouse" recipients type is set (see here). Then select the "Send to all list subscribers" option and proceed with the recipients wizard.
To define the recipients of an existing mail job to be sent to only some subscribers of a dataset, subscriber list or segment:

On the mail job's Workflow page, click the "Define Recipients" step and on the Source page, make sure that the "Send to Recipients in the Subscriber Warehouse" recipients type is set (see here). Then select the "Advanced subscriber selection" option. Then, on the Source Details page, select the "Recipients Selected by Segment and Search" option and proceed to define your own search condition using the links below this option. Then proceed with the recipients wizard.

How Should I Combine Subscriber Lists Into Groups?

Creating your first subscriber list in Maestro means that you create a Standalone Subscriber List. So, when you are planning to create your second subscriber list, you are faced with an important decision: Shall the new list be combined with your first list in the same list group? The simplest and shortest answer to this question is: Usually, yes.

This means that before creating your second subscriber list, you should seriously consider creating a list group with your first list inside and then creating your second list inside the list group.

When should you consider to deviate from this recommendation? Remember that (see above) the Maestro subscriber area page shows lists in the same list group in order to allow users from the Internet to potentially subscribe to all of them and not only to one.

Assume that you consider to store subscriber data in your new list that corresponds to a group with completely different social or demographic background, such as for example a list that is intended for adults in comparison with a list that is intended for children, or if you are acting on behalf of a hardware-producing company, you may want to have one list for your suppliers and one list for your customers. In such a case, you may want to consider keeping the two lists separate. And, since your reason for doing this is that you consider talking to two very distinct groups of people, the fact that logins with the same email address to the two lists will be verified with two separately stored password hashes is not a problem but a desired behavior. (For the example company with the suppliers and customers lists: If you happen to have a supplier that is also your customer, then this person would not be surprised to have two separate logins).
If you are using Maestro but are in fact acting on behalf of two different organizations, then you will also want to keep all subscriber accounts separate and will therefore strongly consider to have the second list separated from the first list. In such a case, you expect the subscribers that you manage in the list group for your first client to not even be aware of the list group (and public subscriber website) that you run for your second client. Naturally, in such a case, you will also want to give the two subscriber websites completely different visual appearances, so that the subscribers view them as belonging to two different corporations. See Website Customization for details on how to accomplish this.
Since you can create as many list groups and combine your lists freely in groups, combinations and variations are also possible: To continue the example of the hardware-producing company: If the company later decides to also have a special "best deals" newsletter list, then the intended target audience for this new list probably overlaps with the target audience of the "customers" list, so in this case it may be a wise decision to add the "best deals" newsletter list to a new list group that you create with the "customers" list as its first list but to retain the separation of these two lists from the "suppliers" list (which is outside of this list group, either standalone or in another group).