Editing Email Authentication Best Practices (section)

== How Many Lists Should I Have? ==
We recommend maintaining fewer lists and refraining from creating one-off lists to send an email. You can also create segments to further group and target your audience based on behavioral characteristics, interests, actions, engagement, and source. Doing so can increase engagement, positively impacting your deliverability, sender reputation, and inbox placement.

For Email marketing, it’s a best practice to create a General Marketing list in your account that will act as the primary email list for your contacts. You can also rename the master contact list in your account to “General Marketing list.”

For SMS Marketing, creating a General SMS Marketing list in your account for your primary SMS broadcast sends is also best practice. [[How to Create an SMS Marketing List]]

From here, you can create additional marketing lists relevant to your business. Some common list types include Newsletters, Event Updates, Promotion Updates, Education, and Feedback.

Remember not to overload on lists; you want to create fewer lists specific to your business’s communication and content needs. It’s also important to only send email campaigns to opted-in contacts, SMS broadcasts to opted-in contacts, and remove folks who don’t engage with your communications. See the [[List Hygiene]] section below for more information on keeping your lists clean.