Seeds and Overrides
The primary audience for any message are those constituents who are on the list.
But what if you need to send a courtesy copy to a colleague, volunteer, or team? Or desperately need to drop someone from a send without recalculating the list?
Seed lists and overrides are the answer.
What to use these for (and what not)
YES: staff, colleagues, department coordinators
NO: actual constituents, manual mailing lists, groups of volunteers
Overrides bypass unsubscribes and therefore should not be used for any type of marketing, invitation, nor solicitation messages going to external audiences except in very, very narrow circumstances.
Overrides
Overrides allow you to manually add or remove individual recipients from a message on a per message basis by email address.
Includes are additional email addresses to send a non-personalized copy of the message to.
Excludes are additional email addresses that you absolutely positively do not want to receive the message.
These are added one by one on the message itself and are added (or removed) from the ultimate delivery audience after all exclusions are determined.
Includes are generally colleagues and volunteers and, oftentimes, yourself.
Excludes are rarely employed but the use case is "Bob Jones just called us screaming again - please make sure he doesn't get today's solicitation". The exclude allows you to suppress him immediately while the process of coding an exclusion on his CRM record may take a day to cycle through the process.
Seeds
One by one additions are fine for ad hoc use but seriously tedious for repetitive use. To help you with that process we've implemented centrally managed seed lists that make two-click mass additions to includes (or excludes) fast and efficient.
We cannot stress enough that seeds/includes:
are not recognized as constituents
will not receive a personalized version of the message
can not unsubscribe from the received message
will almost certainly ask why the unsubscribe link leads them to Google
They're simply email addresses that you feel strongly enough about sending a message to that all controls for suppression, exclusion, and other preferences should be disregarded. It is for this reason that overrides and seeds should only be used for staff and those who are resolute in their desire to see the message. All other recipients should follow normal order - be on a list, subjected to the exclusion filters, and may or may not receive a message as a result.
Managing Seed Lists
Go to Mail > Seed Lists
Give it a reasonable short name. Leave yourself a note in the description about who's in here and why/why not.
Add a neatly comma delimited set of email addresses to the email addresses field. Malformed content will be rejected - harshly.
You can update seed lists at any time.
Do not use these for opt-in mailing lists
That's not their purpose. These are to facilitate inter-office comms as their primary use case and should be used for that narrow use case only.
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