Email marketing is a big part of our business. Over the past six years we've built up over 80,000 subscribers and about 20% of our business comes from marketing to them. We follow all the guidelines of the CAN-Spam Act and all of our contacts are opt-in. We've used Constant Contact and just yesterday they froze our account. They said an ISP contacted them and some emails on our list were listed on their blacklist. So Constant Contact basically gave us two options. 1. Age our account by deleting every email that hasn't been registered in the past year; or 2. Send out an opt-in email to all our of our customers and if they don't reply then they are effectively unsubscribed. Both of these options would decimate our lists and kill our email marketing. They said it might be due to the fact that older emails had bounced too many times and ended up on a blacklist. We had no idea such a thing could happen and Constant Contact does a horrible job of letting you know that this thing could happen if you don't remove your bounced emails. And they provide no data beyond 90 days regarding bounced emails so there is no way to retroactively go and delete these bounced emails that were possibly blacklisted. They give you no warning or time to get this resolved. All they do is freeze your account and more or less tell you to hit the road. Is there any recourse? Or would switching from Constant Contact be our only option? It seems cruel that they would do this to a legit customer of 6 years. Downright sinister.
maybe you can use your data for the last say six years of people who have purchased from you and match their email id and export those into a new crm tool. your list would come down to around 20k. also u could make a policy that if someone does not click ur links in say one year then his/her email sud get deleted. Cheers, kachaloo
its apparent that constant contact is not smart enough to either auto remove bounced emails, or let you know. Get your shovel out, and start digging a new path... as you are finding your new source, be sure to dirt constant contact over, and not look back. and when you find a new company to go with, then ask them how bounced emails are treated... With todays technology, there has to be a way to keep your list clean...
Why didn't you remove bouncers from your list in the first place? I know Aweber has a function like this and I can hardly imagine Constant Contact doesn't.
Thanks for the feedback. Removing bounced emails consistently would've been the way to go but we did not know this sort of thing blocklist thing could happen if you didn't remove all your bounced emails. We have in the past removed non-existent emails, but I guess this was not sufficient. I think an auto-removal of consistently bounced emails should definitely be in place (is there any service that provides this?). And the fact that Constant Contact's anti-spam policy contains nothing about cleaning out bounced emails is pretty ridiculous considering the sort of hazard you can run into. I also wish they had a record of all our bounced emails ever so we could remove them, but it only goes back 90 days so the once bounced emails that could've now made the dreaded blacklist would apparently no longer show up as bounced since the blacklisters are now opening these emails. We're working with Constant Contact to age our list down with a combination of everyone that has opened our email in the last 90 days + all of our paid customers + an opt in email for everyone else, and then I think we might give it a try and see how the numbers compare and if they are much lower than before we'll take our full list elsewhere.
From what your post says, an ISP complained that some of the addresses on your list were on a blacklist. They didn't say YOU were on a blacklist. That means you are sending opt-in email to possible spammers. So how does this concern and affect you? If you had been reported for spam by someone on your list, that would be understandable, but the addresses should be reported to you so you can remove them. The addresses in question should also be examined to make sure they really were opt-in and if so, you should be off the hook. Perhaps there are details missing, but that is my take on the situation and you should be upset by what appears to be confusion on the part of CC. Talking to management with a clear description of the facts of the situation should resolve things. Otherwise there are other vendors like Exact Target that should work with you to avoid problems that are not your fault. But if you want to stay with CC, I don't see what the problem is with the second method they recommend? If people want to stay on your list, they will reply and confirm, if not they don't want to be on your list anymore. But I would insist on what message is sent to your customers and try to provide incentive for them to continue. Say, if they are talking about your dropping addresses for the past 90 days, why not just limit the confirmation mailing to them rather than the rest of the list which seems to be clean? Lastly, bad addresses that bounce should be cleaned out after they bounce a few times to make sure they are going to keep bouncing. But bounced email is not spam and shouldn't bother anyone unless it's excessive. I hope my perspective is useful. Good Luck!
The bottom line is that either you or Constant Contact made a mistake here. If it was your mistake to not remove the bouncing emails and you are happy with the service Constant Contact has given you otherwise then suck it up and go with option 2. Yes it will decimate your list, I haven't been through it personally but I have heard from others who had to reconfirm when moving their lists to a new autoresponder company that if you have a good list about 10% will reconfirm. But, those 10% are the ones who are opening and reading your emails, so the actual loss in terms of money will be far less than you think. If it was a mistake on the part of Constant Contact and you are unhappy with them then its time to move on and find a new autoresponder provider. But keep in mind, whatever company you move to, unless you choose to self host on your own server, will require you to reconfirm the list when you move it, if they let you move it to them at all, some won't.
Thanks very much for these replies. Yeah that's probably more like. From what we can see neither us nor our domain are on any blacklists. That's what we would think but Constant Contact is telling us that ISPs don't give them this information. And despite our attempts at finding out Constant Contact can't tell us hardly anything regarding what the ISPs told them which is very frustrating. From what Constant Contact says you lose a majority of your list when you do a confirmed opt in. And we think it's quite likely a lot of those contacts were legit and wanted your emails but just didn't get the memo or didn't follow through. Or as dyorn says "about 10% will reconfirm". Hopefully so. Yes we've learned our lesson here. Six months ago we removed about 10,000 non-existent emails just on the basis of what they were costing us. Our numbers for the other bounced categories were not as significant so unfortunately we did not remove them all until now. I thought this might be the case that we might have to reconfirm. I have to date only been looking into other services but have not yet spoke to anyone about whether we'd need to reconfirm our list. I'm speaking with someone higher up at Constant Contact now and they are giving us more options. Here's the update: Constant Contact has currently allowed us to keep the following segments of our list: all contacts that subscribed in the past year + all customers that purchased from us in the past 18 months + all subscribers who have opened an email in the past 90 days. Which it looks like is going to equal about half of our 80,000 subscribers. The rest of the email list we'll have to send a confirmed opt-in email which is apparently not successful with the majority of subscribers. They are not allowing us to keep the emails of all our paid customers which we are disappointed with. From the reading I've done around the web it is the Email Service Provider's job to keep their user's lists off of blocklists provided the user is abiding by all anti-spam policies. So I guess Constant Contact has not lived up to their end of the bargain here and they do not have the leverage with ISPs or blacklisters to tell them that we are a legitimate company and not a spammer even though they have all of our numbers which have spam levels below the industry average and they can clearly see and demonstrate that we are not a spammer. Also the fact that they only have data on the contacts that have opened an email in the past 90 days and have bounced in the last 90 days is very unfortunate. Data is cheap and you would think a company the size of Constant Contact would keep this data going back all the way back into a user's history and not delete it off their servers. It's like Google Adwords deleting data from your advertising history. I doubt companies like MailChimp or Aweber have such a practices with their analytics. So it looks like we'll have to cut down our list of six years by about 50% (40,000 contacts) and see what the results are. We have been happy with Constant Contact before this incident so hopefully this will work. I'll post the forthcoming results.