Difficulty with tags

[MargaretH05]

You CANNOT BE SERIOUS... Your Tags system is so lame and "1974" that I'm shocked. You provide the ability to import a spreadsheet with a column heading of TAGS yet the Tags from the Import do NOT go to the manually created matching Tag Folders. What insanity is this? Provide an import but NOT act on the Import? Apparently the total of hours spent on this, 4 on my own over the weekend and 90 minutes this morning, to UNDO all the work already accomplished because your primitive Tag DELETE routine - actually locks the screen for 6-7 minutes for each Tag deletion. I had to open 10 TABS in my browser and start to do the delete on all Tag folders, wait 7 minutes for all ten, instead of the 70 minutes it would have taken. This is quite possibly the most intensely inefficient thing I've seen in the last dozen years. How hard could it possibly be to READ the Tags column in the CSV file, create the Tag Label and add the tag to the contact. I can tell you how long... A LOT LESS THAN THE EIGHT HOURS I WAS FORCED TO USE THIS MESS. Now, the remedy is - get this... I have to tick a checkbox on EVERY CONTACT, and assign that contact to a Tag... Insanity... In any of my 37 companies, someone would be fired.

[MargaretH05]

FOUR HOURS - to deal with 2,172 records... WOW... could there be a worse programmatic solution than the Tags handling system? Choice were: Break the master spreadsheet into 43 individual spreadsheets prior to Import, then painstakingly Import them one at a time into each Tag Label. Take the path of ticking off every record, 50 records at a time - BUT needing to wade through up to 22 screenfuls of 50 at a time before being able to select the next 50 to assign. It would have been 6 hours, but upon reaching the half way point, I had to go to the last record and start working backward 50 records at a time, wading through screenful after screenful, but at least using that trick, allowed only up to 21 screens to wade through. instead of up to 42 screenfuls before getting to the last set to Tag. PAINFULLY, HORRIFICALLY, AWFUL, and WICKEDLY INADEQUATE PROGRAMMING. Outrageous!

[Patrick_W]

Thank you for the feedback @MargaretH05,

Sorry to hear you had such a frustrating time working with our tags feature.  I agree that there are definitely improvements that can be made to that feature.  I want to understand your feedback a little better.

When you imported your list with tags in the tags column, did you have multiple different tags in that column of your spreadsheet?  Also-- had you created the tags in your Constant Contact account prior to the import?

I'm trying to better understand what went wrong here so I can share your feedback.

[CWMarketing]

If you resend to new subscribers but tagged certain addresses to not receive the original message, be warned that (at least as of yesterday), the exclude information is not included when you resend.

Unfortunately, 500+ customers who were deliberately excluded from the monthly newsletter distribution received it yesterday. I thought I was sending to 1 or 2 people when I hit resend.

So far, I have only a few opt outs but am anxiously awaiting spam reports and angry customers. I was able to confirm that it was nothing I did wrong by calling support.

I won't trust this function again.

[BrendaA697]

I am have a list of approx 1500 to upload. I pre-created the tags in Constant Contact. I created tag headers with the Tag names. I have the tag name in each column. I tried to import a single contact via .xlsx file and it would only recognize the FIRST TAG. Although it showed all my other tag columns, it would NOT let me select the column type as TAG.

Can you only import one tag at a time? What is the solution, @Patrick_W? I have 23 tags I need to apply in various combinations to my list. I need to do this efficiently. Before I spend the time slicing and dicing my contacts list in Excel to separate out each tag into a column on each row of my 1500 contacts, I need to be assured that an upload will work.

Otherwise I literally have to split my list into 23 lists and upload one at a time, with a single tag column with the next tag I want to import.

[Patrick_W]

Great question @BrendaA697,

You can upload multiple tags at once-- but not having them separated into multiple columns.  What you would need to have is one column titled 'tags' with the corresponding tag for each contact in that column.  You can have multiple tags per contact, but they would need to be in the same column separated by commas.  The following article should help you visualize this: https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/articles/KnowledgeBase/5957-adding-multiple-tags-in-a-file...

If you're still having trouble let us know and we'd be happy to have someone from our Support Team reach out and assist you.

[BrendaA697]

Thanks so much, @Patrick_W! I called your very excellent technical support this morning and they confirmed that I should just put my tags in one column, separated by commas in that column. 

They also clarified to try to avoid special characters, although an "avoid these special characters document" was not available on the Help site.

The help consultant guided me to the "adding multiple tags" document and put in a request to update the keywords associated with that KB article. I had searched on "upload contacts tags" and did not find that article.

Cheers!

[Patrick_W]

Thanks so much @BrendaA697,

Hopefully those keywords will help others find the article!  Glad to hear you had such a pleasant experience with our Support Team!

[BrendaA697]

@Patrick_W, I love how Cvent can link a KB article to a support ticket. If Constant Contact had a way for users like me to create tickets, I would do that. Ideally linking KB articles to help tickets would:

1) help the user self-service in the future

2) decrease the # of support calls/emails for common problems

3) give reporting visibility to common issues so that recorded trainings to address the questions could greet us when we log in or go to the help page. Again, allowing users to self-service and decreasing support calls/emails.

I've set up tags, now I get to have fun parsing a particularly gnarly excel column to set up lists to place my contacts into! We've got a very diverse contact list!

Cheers and thanks!

[Patrick_W]

Thanks again for the awesome feedback @BrendaA697,

I'm not sure if we have a set-up like this but I will pass your feedback along to our Support and KB teams.