Active Target Limit

What is an Active Target?

Active Targets are records with a valid email address, whom are opted-in to marketing communications and are contained within Marketing and/or CRM Lists. Pertaining to CRM Lists, we only consider records contained within the 4 core modules (Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Targets) of SugarCRM to be active targets.

*Note - We do not consider records within the SugarCRM users module to be active targets within your Pro-Marketer plan.

This is an important metric to follow because Pro Marketer Plans are priced and organized by number of Active Records. In other words, every plan has a limit of the number of Active Targets that can be maintained.

Records that opt-out of all marketing communications, return as a 'hard' bounce when sending email communications, manually deleted or pending activation are not counted against your Active Target Limit. They are also ignored by all of our features and functions. Email Address is a required field value for any records that is imported to LeadFWD. If there is no email address, it will not be imported.

A records status can be changed manually or automatically by our system. As an example, records that unsubscribe from email communication are automatically set as 'unsubscribed'.

What if I exceed my Active Target limit?

We anticipate and expect that you will at some point exceed the limits of your plan. We would view this as a positive situation, because your lead pipeline would be expanding. When you exceed your Active Target limit we will automatically apply a grace period to your account of five (5) days. During that five (5) day grace period you will either need to reduce the number of Active Targets in your Marketing List(s) or SymSync CRM List(s) or upgrade your plan.

How do I reduce my number of Active Targets?

Reducing your number of Active Targets simply means records need to be set to a status of inactive. When a record is inactive they do not count against your Active Target limit and they are no longer tracked by our analytics platform or considered by any outbound features (i.e. Email Campaigns, Automation, Scoring, etc.). You can change the status of records individual through the List Manager (as shown above) or you can create an Automation Workflow to change a group of records to a status of inactive - based on specific criteria. [Article: Reducing the size of a CRM List]

Are there any limits on Grace Periods or the frequency of changing a records status?

Not really. But, we are monitoring for users that are abusing grace periods. If you're receiving frequent grace periods or exceeding your Active Target limit by a wide margin, we will take notice and contact you.

The problem with frequently changing the status of a target records frequently is that you end up with gaps in intelligence, tracking and analytics. Since we will not touch a record that is set to a status of inactive, your target record will be ignored for any active drip campaigns, lead scoring changes, web site activity, landing page activity and so on.

Doing frequent status jumps to avoid upgrading your account is not recommended. It's also probably not the best way to run your marketing program.