Mail Campaigns and Contact Organization

[bingomanatee]

The more I am getting into the way Sugar organizes leads the more issues I am having with its ability to allow me to manage channelled mail campaigns.

the idea with a mail campaign is you have one contact which is a member of one or more mail channels and can opt out of mail entirely, or in and out of channels. The closest metaphor to a mail channel in Sugar is the Account.

This means if you want people to be in multiple mail channels, you need multiple contacts, scattered through different accounts.

Now comes the fun part -- if one contact opts out, they can still get mail from other instances of their record, in other accounts (channels).

Also, say you do this: dump 1,000 leads into an account, go through the agonizing process of transferring the leads into a target list -- and add 15 more people to the account.

You then have to IMPORT ALL 1,015 LEADS AGAIN INTO A TARGET LIST.

Here are a couple of obvious fixes:

1. Allow contacts to be in multiple Accounts. Oddly enough the database model does seem to allow for this but the UI does not.
2. Have a seperate table of opt outs that is keyed to e-mail addresses. That way the opt-out mechanism can operate across any number of duplicated records.
3. Instead of bringing accounts into a target list, simply attach the account to the marketing mail record directly.

In sum, the organization of the data model reflects a very rigid and micromanagerial method of grouping contacts by interests (accounts), and linking them via these intereste to target lists.

Or, if the target lists themselves are the metaphor for the mail channels, there is no easy way to import or link a group of contacts into these channels. And as far as I can tell there's not an obvious way for the contacts to self-select which channels they belong to.