Hi. We have donors who unfortunately share email addresses and as they are individuals they need to receive emails based on them and not just the email address. That may not make sense. So only 1 individual with the email address was brought over to your system and is now in the lists to get emails for whatever list the email is associated with despite the fact that that 1 individual may not be on that list. I was told today to use the work around of adding " 1" before the @ symbol on the emails of the donors not in CC. While I can do this to the 360 records It would be better customer service if that was built into your system. I should never know this is an issue. Your system should sure give the first record that it comes across the original email but for every record that follows it should add that little it to make sure the records are all brought over and sending to the correct lists. I'm amazed that this isn't already built in. Please add this. Please, Pretty Please!
Different records with the same email address
Hi everyone,
Thank you for sharing your feedback and specific use cases! We completely understand the challenge of managing donors, couples, or corporate teams who insist on sharing a single inbox, while you need to send them completely different, personalized campaigns based on their individual status.
While allowing multiple separate contact records to share the exact same email address is Not Currently Planned, there is a critical technical reason for this: Unique Identifiers.
In Constant Contact (and across the email marketing industry), an email address acts as the unique identifier for a profile. This is essential for CAN-SPAM compliance. If a recipient clicks "Unsubscribe," the system must opt-out that specific email address to protect your sender reputation. If five different records shared one email address, the system wouldn't know which profile to unsubscribe, risking severe legal and deliverability violations. It also prevents you from being billed multiple times for the exact same email address!
The Workaround: "Plus Addressing" To achieve your goal of creating two completely separate profiles that deliver to the exact same inbox, you can use a universally supported email trick called "Plus Addressing."
Major inbox providers (like Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail) ignore anything added after a + (plus) sign in an email address. This means you can create "unique" emails for Constant Contact, but the provider will route them to the same place!
Person 1:
[email protected](Add to the Active Donor List)Person 2:
[email protected](Add to the Lapsed Donor List)
To Constant Contact, these look like two entirely different contacts, allowing you to use different First Name merge tags and assign them to different lists. However, both emails will successfully land in the standard [email protected] inbox!
Because requiring a unique email address is an industry-standard database architecture designed to protect your deliverability, we are going to close this thread to keep our board actionable. If you have new feedback regarding contact management, please submit a fresh idea.
Thank you again for sharing your workflows with us!
