Difference between ITGallery contacts and mailing subscribers

ITGallery contacts are internal records of people or companies relevant to the gallery; mailing subscribers are campaign recipients who do not have to be part of your contact database.

In ITGallery you can manage contacts and mailing subscribers, but they do not necessarily have to match.

A contact can be saved in ITGallery and also be subscribed to one or several mailing lists. But you can also have subscribers who only exist within the Mailing module and are not recorded as contacts in ITGallery.

What an ITGallery contact is

A contact is a person, company or organisation whose information you want to keep and manage from the Contacts module.

For example, it could be:

• A collector.
• An artist.
• A gallery.
• A supplier.
• A client.
• Someone the gallery has a relevant relationship with.

Contacts usually have fuller information: personal details, professional details, tags, categories, history, and links to sales, offers or other gallery activities.

What a mailing subscriber is

A subscriber is a person or company who is part of a mailing list and can receive email campaigns.

A subscriber does not have to be saved as a contact in ITGallery.

This is useful when you have people who want to receive communications from the gallery, but whose information you do not need to manage within your contact database.

For example, you can have as subscribers people who signed up to your lists at an art fair, visitors interested in receiving newsletters, or general audiences who want information about exhibitions, artists or gallery activities.

When to use contacts and when to use subscribers only

Use Contacts when the person or company has a relevant relationship with the gallery and you want to keep their information within ITGallery.

Use mailing subscribers when you only need to send email communications and do not want to add those people to your main contact database.

This lets you keep your contact database clean and avoid recording as contacts people whose email you only need for general communications.

How contacts and subscribers relate

When you record a contact in ITGallery, you can turn on the Save for mailing option.

When you do, the contact is added as a subscriber to the mailing lists you select.

If the contact has categories assigned, ITGallery automatically proposes the mailing lists matching those categories.

For example:

1. You create the contact Maria Pepper.
2. You assign the categories Public and VIP.
3. You turn on the Save for mailing option.
4. ITGallery proposes adding Maria to the Public and VIP mailing lists.
5. Before saving, you can keep those lists, remove one or add others.

This way you control which mailing lists each contact is included in.

Add subscribers without creating contacts

You can also add subscribers directly to the Mailing module without creating them as contacts in ITGallery.

This is useful when you want to manage general recipient lists that only need to receive campaigns, but whose information you do not want to bring into the Contacts module.

To see how to create and manage these lists, see the article Manage subscriber lists.