Can you make a way for new contacts upload lists to not overwrite previous data

[dougc086]

We are having a problem.

When someone signs up a person (i.e. Sally) to our newsletter - they get to be added on their list.  (i.e. Bob gets Sally to sign up so they go on Bob's list.)

But the problem is if Sally then buys something in our store two months later - we add all new customers to our "general update" newsletter list.  

So now Sally is getting a duplicate email from us each month.  The general one and Bob's! (They are almost identical newsletters).  This is a problem! 

And we have no way of knowing that the new store customers were already on our database **unless we check each new customer individually.**  That is way too much time to spend.

We used to be with Vertical Response and they had a box to check "Do not overwrite old data if already on database".

Can that be done with Constant Contact?  if not - the developers need to make that an option.

Thank you,

Douglas

[William_A]

Hello @dougc086 ,

Are you using an official integration to bring over these contacts from your sales database? Otherwise, I'm not sure what options would be practical in the system, as it's built to be able to import existing contacts and update their list memberships accordingly when imported with a new list selection. If you're using an outside CRM for managing your sales contacts and importing them, you can check to see if there's any setting within that system that would cause sales additions to also trigger removal from existing lists, or prevent them from being added to the general list.

The other question I'd have is if your agents are sending the same emails to their targeted lists that are being sent to the general list, why have the agents send to separate lists? Is the main objective to make these emails seem like they're coming from a specific person just for those particular instances, even though they're technically getting the same info and email as someone not assigned to an agent? Would it make more sense to have the agent-specific emails have something more unique to those agents' offerings, and have the general list be something more mundane that wouldn't be included in the agents' emails?

Other options you can do from within your account is to make sure contacts in specific agents' lists are tagged as such (i.e. "agent list"). This way they you can narrow-by-tag to exclude agent-list contacts when sending to your general list.

The other option would be to go into the general list, select-all, and manually remove contacts from agents' lists ahead of each email's sendout, or vice versa - to go into each agent's list, select-all, and manually remove all their contacts from the general list.