Advice on working with a large list of varied Contacts & how to categorize them

Hi everyone!

As an introduction, I would like to say that my post will be long and I am fairly new to email marketing, so bear with me.

After the trial, I have to say Zoho Campaigns has by far the easiest Campaign Editor compared to its competition. However, other features leave much to be desired: no conditional (if) merge tags, no secondary emails for same contact (you need to add it twice with its separate emails), small character limits for Name/Surname, can’t preview merge tags in test emails.

I really want to keep using Zoho, but I am having the following issue. I work for a think/tank NGO. Apart from press releases, we send a *lot* of letters. We usually form them as follows:

To: Name + Surname, Job Title

Dear Mr/Ms Surname or To whom it may concern,

Our contact list is huge and quite varied in its categorization: mayors, regional governors, ministers, MPs, MEPs, committees, other organizations, etc. And there are further categorizations: some have names + surnames + job titles, others just have a name (for example, groups, other NGO, entities). Moreover, not all of our letters are addressed personally to their recipients, as we use "To whom it may concern" a lot.

So, as you can see, we already have multiple different categorizations that can apply simultaneously: different roles (mayors, governors etc), recipients that get a personal greeting and recipients that don’t, recipients that have names + surnames + job titles, recipients that have names + surnames and no job title & recipients that just have name.

Without conditional merge tags and even after adding a Personal Greeting Custom Field for each of my contacts (which was a very slow and annoying procedure but had to be done), I still find it hard to categorize them with what Zoho offers for its Lists and Segments. If you have any advice on what I should do to make my life easier, I am all ears.

And a last question: are Segments a Standard feature and Bulk Segments a Professional feature?