Today, I’m going to go over a few of the problematic email address types that can also result in a Constant Contact account disabling for a review.
In the interest of brevity, I’ll only be discussing a few of the different types of addresses in this post, you can expect a follow-up post in a few weeks that will discuss some others. Today’s topic will be “role”, “transactional”, and “group” addresses
About Role Addresses:
True to their name, role addresses don’t necessarily belong to any one person as a personal email address would, but rather a specific role in the organization. Examples include admin@, jobs@, legal@, support@, among many others.
“So what’s wrong with those?” you may ask. The trouble comes when someone new takes on the role, or in the case of addresses like office@ or customerservice@, the address is owned by multiple people. If someone were to leave a company and take ownership of an address only to see marketing emails coming in, that could result in complaints against the sender. Additionally, if someone signs up with a role address that goes to their whole team, everyone who gets the email may not recognize the sender, resulting in multiple complaints.
Examples:
- Evan works for an e-commerce company and monitors the support@ email address. After he leaves the organization, Mary takes over his duties. Evan had used the support@ to sign up for some emails from an office supplies company they use. Mary, not knowing the company where they get their supplies from, files a complaint with the email sender for what she considers spam.
- Jack manages a sales team of 20 people and attends some webinars that offer sales advice. Thinking his team could benefit from them, Jack uses the sales@ email address to sign up for their newsletter. The team, however, doesn’t recognize why they are getting these emails and marks them as spam in their inbox.
- Similarly, if someone on that sales@ email address unsubscribes, it would unsubscribe the whole distribution list.
About Transactional Addresses:
Also known as anonymous email addresses, if you’ve ever used a site like Craigslist, you’re probably familiar with these. They are usually a long string of random letters and numbers followed by the domain for the specific website that they were generated from. These addresses are useful for protecting one’s identity during a sale or transaction online, however, they can sometimes end up in someone’s address book or contact list as a result.
By their nature, these are meant to be more temporary email addresses and not used for ongoing marketing emails. If you find these within your list, it’s highly unlikely that anyone actually provided it to you with the intent of signing up for emails.
About Group Addresses:
These are pretty similar to role addresses, however instead of being specific to an organization, they are specific to online groups, Usenet, or online forums. Two of the most common examples are Yahoo Groups and Google Groups.
Much like role addresses, emails sent to group addresses will go to anyone on that distribution list.
What Happens If I Upload These Addresses?
Due to their problematic nature, Constant Contact made the business decision long ago to block sending to these addresses through our system (with the exception of a very small number of role addresses). If a couple accidentally end up in your contact list, no big deal! Just move them to your unsubscribe folder and go about your day.
However, if a large number of these addresses are imported, it could indicate an issue with the collection of the list as a whole, and you may be asked to call in for an Account Review so we can set you (and us) up for success.
Additional Resources:
We have a Knowledge Base article about Role addresses.
As always, the experts on our Account Review team can answer any additional questions you may have.
