How can I find contacts subscribed to multiple lists

Hi. I have several lists that receive separate campaigns.

Most of these campaigns share a similar set of variable/custom fields.

However, on the odd occasion that a contact is imported that is already an active contact on a different list, some of those fields will be overwritten when being imported to the second list, which will mess up any campaigns they receive from the original list.

I figure there’s a way to set up an automation this to avoid this in the future by removing them from the former list when imported to the new one, which I am looking into, but for now, is there an easy way to hunt down any contacts that are already on multiple lists?

Because currently the only solution I’ve figured out is to filter by “subscribed to all of” and do that filter for every possible pair of lists, which would be well over a 100 different pairings, and until I get that automation figured out, I would have to do these 100+ filters every time I upload a batch of new contacts or upload a file of updated custom fields on old contacts.

Could you share some background as to how your lists are organized?

Hi @stellar-strategic you can achieve this slightly more easily by using a combination of conditions:

Is subscribed to list - All of - ListA
AND
Is subscribed to list - At least one of - ListB, ListC, etc.

Still a bit clunky, but also note you’d just have to set it up once and then save the search so you can re-use it later.

I can also help you map out the automation(s) if you like.

We have a separate list for each of our clients that we do marketing for.

As they are all in the same industry and mostly have the same target demographics (with a little variance based on what marketing program they sign on for), we occasionally see contacts that are on more than one clients’ member/prospect import file, despite us avoiding taking on multiple clients in the same geographical market.

That would definitely cut the number of searches/filters down a ton. Thanks!

As for the automation, the trigger would obviously be “When contact subscribes to any list”, but when I go to make an If/Else statement, I don’t see a way to specify “the list” in question when I try to have it check if the contact is already an active contact on a list that is not the one it just subscribed to.

Would I just have to make a separate automation for each list to do this? Or is there a way to specify the list that activates the trigger that I’m missing?

Unfortunately yes, just like with the searches, I believe you’d have to create an automation for each list.
Just curious - you mentioned that the issue is that you have multiple clients, and their contact lists may overlap. Why do you want to unsubscribe them from one list or the other then? Shouldn’t they all stay subscribed to their individual client lists?

Mainly because of the custom/variable fields. If we were to send a campaign to a contact populated with the data from a different client, and the contact tries to claim that rate/deal/offer with the 1st client, it would not be good at all.

Since the custom fields are mostly shared between the various campaigns, if I were to upload a contact to a second list, most of the fields would be overwritten outside of consistent things like their name.

If I have to choose between sending an invalid offer to a contact, or sending them only one out of two campaigns, I’ll choose the latter. I suppose I could tag the contact somehow via the automation rather than unsubscribing them, but that would require adding new conditions to all of my list segments to exclude those tags.

Fair enough - my only other recommendation is to create separate custom fields for each client so this never becomes an issue. It could be a lot of work, but at least you could be much more certain that a contact would never receive the wrong campaign details.