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Building a list

An event invitation, a client alert, a seasonal mailing — all of them start the same way: decide who should receive it, and keep that decision somewhere the firm can reuse and audit.

Lists are that. This page covers the two kinds of list, how members get on and off one, and how to share a list without losing control of it.

Everything here is Core. Lists live on the Lists tab in the CV Marketing app.

1. Static or Dynamic — decide this first

The Type field has two values, and it is the most consequential choice you make:

Type Membership Use when
Static Fixed. Members change only when someone changes them The audience is a decision — an invitation list, a curated group
Dynamic Rebuilt from a query The audience is a definition — "all GCs in the energy practice"

A dynamic list is a rule, not a roster. Anyone matching the criteria joins automatically and anyone who stops matching drops off. That is exactly right for "current clients in Germany" and exactly wrong for "people we invited to the dinner" — because next month the dinner list would quietly change, and you would have no record of who was actually asked.

For a dynamic list, Update Frequency controls the rebuild: Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, or Annually. Choose the slowest cadence that keeps the list honest; every rebuild is work. Manual is retired: an older list may still show it, but you can no longer choose it.

2. List Status

Three values: Pending · Active · Inactive

Status is how colleagues know whether a list is ready to be used. Pending means still being assembled — do not send to it. Active means in use. Inactive retains the list and its history without implying it is current, which is what you want for last year's event rather than deleting it.

3. Getting people onto the list

One at a time

The Add Member action on the List record adds a single contact. Fine for corrections; slow for building.

From a file

The Import CSV action, and the CSV List Import tool in the List sidebar, load members in bulk. This is the normal route when the audience came from somewhere else — a conference attendee list, a spreadsheet from a practice group.

From a query — the List Builder

The List record has a List Builder tab, a guided builder for assembling membership by criteria rather than by name. A Dynamic List tab holds the query itself.

Filters can combine conditions with AND / OR and parentheses, and can test related records — for example, "has a Connection scored 3 or higher".

Your firm may have preset the builder. An administrator can configure which object it opens on, which filters it starts with, and how fields map onto list members — so the builder may already be scoped to the work you do rather than starting blank. Your admin can also add a set of ready-made Contact filters (company, location, title, relationship strength). They can also lock the field mapping, in which case you can add members but not change how they are mapped. That is a deliberate control, not a fault. See List Builder.

The tabs change with the list's Type, which is why colleagues describe different screens. A Static list shows Details · List Builder · Audit and Files · Sharing · Related · My Contacts. A Dynamic list shows Details · Dynamic List · Audit And Files · Related · My Contacts — no List Builder tab, and no Sharing tab. If a tab someone mentioned is not there, check the Type before assuming a permissions problem.

From other lists

The sidebar's Source Lists tab is the part people miss. A list can draw from sub-lists, and can itself be a destination list fed by others. That lets you maintain "EMEA clients" and "UK clients" once and compose larger audiences from them, instead of rebuilding overlapping lists that drift apart.

An exclusion always wins. If any source list excludes someone, they stay excluded on the destination list, even when another source list includes them.

Checking your own contacts — My Contacts

The My Contacts tab compares your own relationships with the list. It splits them into On this list and Not on this list, with a coverage meter. Look at Not on this list for people you know who are missing.

If it shows an error or no contacts, ask your ClientVerse admin. My Contacts reads your firm's relationship (ERM) data and needs a permission your admin assigns.

4. Included, Excluded, and why the counts differ

List membership is not a simple in-or-out. List Member Status has seven values:

Included · Excluded · Invited · Pending · Approved · Confirmed · Declined

The List record carries three counts: Member Count, Included Member Count, and Excluded Member Count.

Do not trust these numbers. They are plain number fields, not rollups — nothing recalculates them when membership changes. In the reference org a list reporting Member 4 / Included 20 / Excluded 9 actually has six member records. Treat the counts as a label someone set once, and open the List Members related list when the number matters.

Excluded is the important one. It means "this person was considered and deliberately left off" — not "this person was never here". That distinction is what stops someone re-adding a contact who was removed for a reason: a client who asked not to be contacted, a person on the other side of a matter, a relationship a partner is handling personally.

Before you send, open the List Members list and filter by status. Do not reason from the count fields — see the warning above.

The Invited / Pending / Approved / Confirmed values support event workflows, where being on the list and having accepted are different states.

5. The CRM Tools panel

The List record's sidebar carries a CRM Tools panel with three tools, easy to miss because they sit below the Source Lists section:

Tool Does
CSV List Import Drag-and-drop CSV upload with column auto-detection, then validate and confirm
Bulk Add to List / Campaign Push members from here into another list or a campaign
Bulk Activity Logger Log an activity against every member at once

Bulk Activity Logger is the one worth knowing about. Logging a seminar or a mailing against two hundred contacts one at a time is not work anyone should do, and doing it here keeps each contact's Last Contacted Date and engagement scoring honest — see Logging meetings and activity.

6. Sharing a list

The Share List action, and the Sharing tab on the List record, control who else can see and work with the list.

Each share sets what the person can do: view the list, add members, remove members, or add and remove. ClientVerse enforces that, so a view-only share cannot change the list. You can remove one person or group without affecting anyone else's access.

The Sharing tab also carries List Changes — a record of how membership has altered. For a list that drives external communication, that history is the answer to "who added this person?", which is a question that gets asked only after something has gone wrong.

The Audit and Files tab holds logs and attached documents for the same reason.

Sharing with someone outside Salesforce

A list can also be shared with an email address, for someone who has no Salesforce login. They open a page that needs no login, where they can review the list, add or remove members, and leave notes. Each link has one purpose, can be revoked, and is audited. This needs an Experience Cloud site that your admin sets up, so ask them whether it is available at your firm and how to send a link.

7. Getting data back out

Export Child Records on the List record exports the membership. The same action exists on Campaign.

See Running a bulk update for the fuller picture of moving data in and out.

Troubleshooting

"My dynamic list is empty." Check Update Frequency. An older list may still say Manual, and then nothing rebuilds until someone asks it to. Manual is retired, so pick a schedule instead.

"Someone reappeared after I removed them." They were probably removed from a source list but still match a dynamic rule, or they were deleted rather than set to Excluded. Use Excluded — it is durable in a way deletion is not.

"The counts look wrong." Member Count includes every status. Compare it with Included Member Count before assuming a fault.

"Two lists that should match have drifted." That is the case for source lists — maintain one and compose, rather than keeping parallel copies.