CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Care and Feeding of Static vs Smart Groups for CiviMail

CiviMail tests have been going much better and Cron job seems to be working - thanks for all the help in the forum !!

Now I'm wondering how best to feed the CiviMail process.  It looks like we can feed it with Static or Smart Groups that are flagged for CiviMail or maybe with the same group used for a previous mailing.  I'm wondering if static or smart groups would be better.

For Static groups we would have to clear out the group and save a query to the group to establish it.  Certainly possible, but might forget to rebuild sometimes.

Smart groups might be easier, but I'm wondering about the overhead.  I've seen forum discussions that indicated smart groups might impact performance, but I'm not clear in what circumstances - perhaps uploads?  Seems unlikely that we would have large upload batches with email address fields. 

Our list is about 2,000 with about 70 percent having email addresses.   A "Search Builder" of Individual / Email !=   seems to get everyone.  Should I create a static group with the ones with emails or just include everyone and let CiviMail figure out which ones have email addresses?

Similar for Smart Groups, is it better to create a smart group with everyone or have a smart group with just those with email addresses?

Also, better to go with static approach or Smart Group approach.

What effect does {action.unsubscribeUrl} have with smart groups?
   
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Smart group vs static may become academic anyway as we segment the contacts - I don't think we want a whole bunch of smart groups out there - do we?

Thanks.

Looking back, I found this post when we were first starting CiviCRM.  After running CiviCRM for over a year and a half, all of our important groups are smart groups based on the values of custom fields.  The few static groups are either very small for specific purposes or temporary in nature to do things like identify the contact records for an import.

There are over 100 political districts in Colorado so we will have close to 200 smart groups for political and other purposes.

Hope this helps someone else starting with CiviCRM.