TL/DR we need better logical operators/capabilities for including or excluding contacts who are on multiple lists. And a few other things are frustrating if you manage to read all the way through to the end. Cheers to those that do. There is a huge hole in terms of list/audience segmentation capabilities that is causing me a great deal of extra work. I came to CC from where it was very easy to automate with logical flows adding and removing tags and segment inclusion for contacts along with the ability to create logical statements saying things like (send an email to this group of contacts who are either tagged this way, or segmented this way or whatever other meaningful criteria (of which there is a lot to choose from) AND ALSO exclude this group of contacts who might be on one of those lists but who happens to be also tagged or segmented another way or who clicked x, y or z link). I can't describe to you the power and freedom that gave in terms of letting my audience dictate which and how often they wanted to receive my emails. The move to CC from was dictated by a need for greater design capabilities. Where CC grossly lags behind in automation it is ahead (but still limited in some odd ways) in the area of design. That said, the automation and logical functions to reliably narrow down to the exact set of contacts I want any given email to go to and the ability to provide my audience simple and seamless ways to provide me feedback that I know will let me treat them better and allow me to do that narrowing down without jumping through many extra hoopes, is starting to cost me more time than the design enhancements are worth. Case in point, in CC I can make a segment with logical operators that says: include contacts on lists a, b, c or d AND excludes contacts on lists e or f. Seems simple right? By this logical statement I should get those contacts who are on ANY of the first 4 lists who are not also on ANY of the second two lists. But no. That doesn't work because the OR operator in the second clause is saying exclude those that are on both e or f vs either e or f. Maybe give us parenthesis to decide ourselves which we want? Or the ability to say ANY vs BOTH? So my second effort around this limitation, perhaps I can try tags? No, same result. It's still BOTH not ANY in the OR clause. Sigh. Third effort, maybe I can do it with segments. I'll create a segment just for those first four lists and a segment with the second two lists and try to create a new segment that is all of segment 1 but exclude segment 2. No. Sigh. That doesn't work because you can't use segments within segments. Sigh again. Third effort 2, maybe I can take a segment and then like in a list, I can select all within the segment and tag them with an intermediate tag that covers what I can't do with excluding one segment from another...No, that doesn't work either. The simple function of tagging everyone in a list isn't available within a segment. Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. New side issue/limitation: Why doesn't the simple action of tagging everyone in a list work for everyone in a segment? Many SIGHS later, what did work? I had to make my own intermediate list that I will now need to manage every day to make sure that my conctacts who have opted out of my daily emails to instead either not get the current daily campaign at all or who would prefer a weekly digest are on a newly created "no daily seasonal campaing list", but who are also on lists "don't include me in this campaign at all" or "I only want emails from this campaign on a weekly basis", respectively. These limitations are so frustrating that I'm taking half an hour to write this treatise starting at 05:35 central time on a Sunday morning. The reality for me is that as a Partner and manager of several small to medium sized accounts for my clients, I can't afford to lose contacts for them because seemingly simple logic isn't possible. And yes, I err on the side of customer service both to my clients and to the contacts on their lists who should expect more than what is currently possible, so I take the time both to jump through the hoops I've described, and to layout my frustrations with the limitations that are the root cause. Side bar, it's funny to me that another frustration I've come across in the CC email builder is not present here...In this the text editor, the text box scrolls down so I can always see the kitchen sink of editing tools above whereas in the CC email builder, if the email is long, I often have to scroll up to find the kitchen sink to change text size or color or update a link and more often than not when I highlight text and then move up to find those tools, the bar doesn't show and I have to repeat the process. Can the tool bar just float or be present at the top and bottom of the editing window or somehow always appear in a visible portion of the DOM? I also didn't even get into the frustration of copying and pasting text into an email only to not have it show when I Preview the email or send a test out. That's a fun bug that happens a lot too... Ok, that's all for now. Thanks in advance to whomever reads this and responds in a meaningful and constructive way. These things really should be easier in 2024.
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