Inactive Contacts on Marketing Lists

I learned something new today about inactive contacts and marketing lists.

When implementing CRM, I generally setup security such that most general users cannot fully delete records but rather deactivate them. This protects from the accidental deletion, not that any of us have ever done that before... :)

Anyways, A client called up and said that they sent out their annual report, and used CRM marketing lists to generate the mailing labels. They sent out the Annual Report and got a few bounce backs from contacts who were retired or had moved on to other organizations. When they went to CRM to de-activate these contacts, they noticed that they had already been deactived some time ago!

Upon further investigation, these inactive contacts were still members of the various lists, including this particular customer's Annual Report marketing list.

I suppose this is by design in case you want to market to lost customers, or lost leads, etc. However maybe their should be an option in the system settings to set whether a marketing list can have inactive members.

Anyways, after going through the process of "managing marketing list" members we were able to clean up the list. However, after years of working with CRM, there are still things that you discover every day!