Multiple Emails for Contacts

[RobynK54]

Many of the indivduals we are sending our email campaigns to have multiple email addresses (either a personal and work, or a work email and an assistant, sometimes multiple assistants, etc.).  Before, we were able to send the same message to up to three different email addresses under one contact, by labeling the emails as "work", "home" and "other".

Now that Constant Contact has updated and changed their contacts to only having 1 email address per contact, we are unable to properly reach our intended audience.  

This significantly reduces the functionality of Constant Contact for our business and we have already started looking at other options. 

[MitchellW2]

I strongly agree with this comment. I will be actively looking for a replacement system, since this doubles the effort I have to make to add contacts. Plus, what happens to the CC form I created that has two email addresses, do I need to change that, and what happens if a person fills two email addresses on that form?

[ClaudeC1]

need more columns to accurately fill out the contact names, and 5 isn't quite enough!

[IlanaL5]

Agreed.  You product just become much less useful.

MailChimp has been mentioned as a competitor - we will be looking at them to see what they offer.

Very poor decision here - some work email servers may limit certain mail characteristics - so sending to a home address as well is necessary.

[CathyS6]

Agreed! This is a big problem for us. We run a dog-related business and most of our clients (the dogs) have two parents' email addresses associated with their accounts.  The accounts are named for the dogs, not the humans, so I can't create two accounts for one dog just because he has a mom and a dad.  I sure hope this is going to be fixed soon.

[AngelaM80]

Absolutely agreeed. The data entry portion of inputting contacts is grueling.

Terrible decision made by CC.

[AmericaCampaign]

+1 on the above comment. We're looking to move off of CC because of this feature removal. We only received notification on 9/19 that this was going to happen on 9/22. 3 days notice of removal of a MAJOR feature is totally unacceptable.

[Nathan_L]

Thank you so much for your feedback in regards to single email addresses per contacts. We removed this option to alleviate some pain points for customers that were causing things such as duplications within the account.

- These contacts have been known to cause issues with our system and we are looking to simplify.

- We are working to ensure there are no negative impacts on your bill.
- Contacts will be split so the secondary, 3rd, 4th etc. email addresses are on their own contacts
- We will not be deleting contacts.
- At this time, we do not have an exact date as we are still working on making this a seamless transition but we will send another update when we have more information.

Please contiue to share your thoughts on this and we will continue to keep you updated.

[MitchellW2]

@bnlucas:

Many of us use forms that allow contacts to enter multiple emails. We need a way for those forms to go into our contact management system without increasing our workload.

[MontessoriDresher]

This feature that was recently removed is a loss of efficiency and organization. I work at a school where being able see multiple emails for a parent on one screen is quite helpful. It is not unusual in today's world for people to "own" several email addresses. Multiple addresses should be maintained under each contact with the flexibility of adding additional email addresses (up to 5 max, as before!) that correspond to specific email lists.

[PegA4]

I understand constant contact eliminated the option to add a second email address for a contact. This is unfortunate, as this prevents one contact from being able to receive work-related emails vs emails they want to receive at their home email. I had to create a new contact (counts toward additional cost) for a person's work email to receive info about a conference they are attending (it is the email they want associated with the conference). I recommend constant contact restore the ability to add more than one email to a contact's record. This not only prevents confusion when looking through a contact's total engagement (one now has to look at both email records and manually try to compare them), it doesn't add unnecessary costs.

[HMSC]

I also want to have this feature reinstated.  (BTW, If i'm voting for this as requested above, am I voting to reinstate the feature of the OP, or to approve the moderator's solutions/choices? Because I do not want the latter.)

Regarding more than one email address per contact, consider this: You are a customer receiving a newsletter. You are receiving it at your home and work emails by choice. CC provides the ability for the customer to update their own contact record and you have in the past had multiple emails in your record. Up until this change, you would be able to see both of your email addresses in your contact profile. Now what happens, you have to manage two profiles?  This just doesn't make sense. What if you had an old old email address you're finally getting rid of but now want to receive mail at two new addresses? Would the customer have to create a new record for the extra email address? That's a good way to piss off a customer.  Then, from our point of view, wouldn't only one record keep the engagement history and then the other new address would have to have a totally fresh/no engagement history record? That makes no sense and kinda defeats the purpose of being able to analyze data.  It also makes it more difficult for US to manage our contacts efficiently. 

If you're looking to help US better manage our customers' emails, perhaps provide a detailed import guide that includes instructions on how CC matches data so that we can help avoid accidently making duplicate records when importing.  (for example, which field is used to match records? I've heard two different answers to this: email address, and more recently first name/last name.) Or, why not work on developing a tool we can use to easily identify duplicate emails in unique contacts across a select number of lists (or all lists) which then offers options on how to reconcile/fix/ignore the issue.

[TinaC292]

This needs to happen.  Often times we have more than one e-mail address for a single contact and should have the ability to include all addresses under one name.

[lmoffat]

I never cared for or needed the feature, but now it's a problem with list segmenting. Any contact export still uses the email address types, in separate columns. After I segment and try to upload, it causes an error because there are multiple Email columns in the upload, but only one Email Address field available for uploading. This happens even when a single row only has one email address. 

What are you doing to remove the email address type from current contacts? 

[mchristo]

Oh man, this could be a problem with serious consequences.  And it already looks like one step forward, two steps back.

Usually I'd advise not tinkering with an interface or the import tools until the database has been properly redesigned.  In this particular case, I'd advise at about 120 db.

But I guess I'm a little too late with that.

Michael

[MonaD12]

I know that you are moving to a one email per contact feature and while this will be VERY helpful in reviewing reports of unopened campaigns, it takes away the opportunity for distribution to more than one email.  People use different emails for different purposes.  I wish there was a way to keep multiple emails but develop a way to know which email was used to read the campaign.  

[DarlaH94]

I don't understand why you changed this function. Now my number of emails is skewed because some of them are duplicate names.

[MonicaW26]

Please bring back the option to allow multiple emails per contact.  Our list was segmented to send particular types of communications to particular types of list based on customer needs/preferences.  You have removed this ability and caused us to clutter up our database by adding multiple contacts for the same person.

[TCHOA]

This feature has been taken away. Why?! Process: Our contacts are by residents' address (HOA). Every resident requires 2 email addresses (husband & wife). This is constantly changing with New Neighbors and with changing email addresses. Therefore, the contacts are uploaded from an excel DB dumped from Quickbooks at least once or twice a month. Problem: Eliminating a second email address for a contact has added so much more work. The excel worksheet must be edited for all 800+ contacts where there is a column for a 2nd email address. Because CC no longer reads the 2nd email address, now that column must be added as a second row for that contact in order to make them SEPERATE contacts in CC to receive announcements. QB does not populate the excel spreadsheet this way. It now must be done manually. Solution: It is my understanding from your help desk that this feature was removed to make reporting more accurate for each email address. If this field was being used by customers, why would you not CORRECT the reporting so it worked properly with this field rather than removing the field. I run two different CC accounts and will find this to be a problem with both accounts. Additionally: Last week, I also learned while creating a campaign, that the ability to write html code to a link (so a prepared email would open) was also removed. I never received notice for the removal of this feature nor the removal of the 2nd email address feature. Is there some reason I would not be notified. Both of my accounts work differently, so I'm not sure when one or the other will be upgraded and I may lose other functionality.

[SCMEA_Music]

Please bring back multiple emails per contact.  If somebody later decides they only want to receive email at their work address rather than their home address, they can unsubscribe from one of their addresses.  Most of my users have two email addresses -- so when you separate them, will you bill me double?  Also, when I have to add people to extra lists, now I have to do that twice - once for their home account and once for their work account.  Please Bring Back Multiple Emails!!

[LoriC339]

I am like everyone else here and feel this needs to be changed back to the way it was.  I feel this was a complete disaster and has caused many issues.  1 - Not only will it create double the work (entering double the amount of contacts) but that also means it will add to the amount of time it takes to add them which will change my budget and payroll.  2 - My business has clients that don't always relay the information in the email to their spouse.  To create a new contact for the 2nd spouse in the same household will ruin the way I keep I track of the number of families I coorespond with (2 separate email contacts would = 2 households instead of 1).... Multiply that by the amount of times I have to add a new contact for a 2nd email and my numbers are completely off.  3 - If I go ahead and add these 2nd contacts, it will double the amount of contacts I have with you, which may cause me to go above the allowed contacts on the tier I pay for and therefore increase my payment price.  I hope you all realize these issues are all negatives toward CC and return it to the previous way!

[RyanM39]

I manage an email list for a school, and I take the addresses out of our student information system (csv) and then upload to Constant Contact. Most families have more than one email address (mom & dad, home & work, etc), but having multiple contacts per family really messes up updating custom merge fields. 

I have had nothing but a great experience with Constant Contact, however, our pre-paid plan expires soon, and this feature changes has made it necessary that our organization seek a service to send emails.

[POA]

I posted this response on another thread. I'm with the people above.

I work for a property owners' association and sometimes have multiple owners in different states or countries.

BTW, get REAL. The reason this was done is because we pay by our total contacts. IF we can't combine comtacts, it increase our rates.

As a small non-profit wher EVERY penny counts, THAT MATTERS.

I will DEFINITELY be looking for another email software provider.  

[POA]

I posted this response on another thread on CC. I'm with the people above.

I work for a property owners' association and sometimes have multiple owners in different states or countries.

BTW, get REAL. The reason this was done is because we pay by our total contacts. IF we can't combine comtacts, it increases our rates.

As a small non-profit where EVERY penny counts, THAT MATTERS.

Our prepaid contract renews in the spring and  will DEFINITELY be looking for another email software provider to suggest to my Board of Directors.

[LaGuardiaHSPA]

Add me to the list of people who are really annoyed by this change! And thanks for just doing it without any indication in the software that it was gone.  I was going insane trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.  It is really annoying to have to create all separate contacts for families within a single household, it duplicates all our efforts SIGNIFICANTLY.  Please put it back immediately!

[AmberM34]

You removed a critical feature for marketers. No clue why you would have removed the capability to import multiple email address for one person. Out of a list of 50,000 people, I can no longer add 3,000 additional emails. For marketers, all emails are extremely valuable. I can not justify paying for a service that is doing me a disservice. I am now exploring mailchimp and other e-blast platforms. I'm sad as your customer service is stellar and the platform is extremely user friendly which is why I stayed with you guys this long.

[MIchaelC2494]

THIS SHOULD BE A NO BRAINER???!!! WHY ISN'T IN PLACE ALREADY?

[PaulW95]

I agree!

[SCMEA_Music]

The customer service personnel explain that there were 'defects' in the way that the system worked prior to this 'fix'.  They say that "People with multiple email addresses wouldn't know what list they were on for their various email addresses".  It sounds like marketing administrators (CC Users) need training -- Not to be cut off at the knees.

The CSR had no problem transferring me to billing to discuss cancellation.  That's sad.

The Billing CSR had no idea of this change at his company - and kind of agreed with me that this whole thing 'smells wrong'.  I asked to be put in contact with a manager higher up in the company so I can express my displeasure.  We'll see what happens.

[CMCM]

We make critical use of the ability to have multiple email addresses associated with a single contact. I see that this feature has now been removed. This is unfortunate as that was a key selling feature for us. We use CC to maintain a membership list for a mountain climbing club. We are about 350 people. Some members want to get club emails at both home or work, or to have their spouse on their membership (we have individual and family memberships). I understand that now I need to have individual contact records for each email address for that person. Keeping multiple records in sync will be not be easy. I'm not even sure how I will know that a specific person has multiple records that need to be kept in sync. For example, one of the fields is membership expiry date. I use that field to identify members that need to get an email telling them to renew. If a person renews I can update their record with a new expiry date - but I don't know how it will be obvious if that person has multiple records so that I can update that information on every record for that contact. Thus he might renew, but I might keep sending him notices to pay-up on his other contact records (which I suspect he could find annoying!) That's why this was such a good feature! I hope you can put this feature back in. Thanks, Ken

[KendallTrust]

Previously, I could have two email addresses for the same contact person. That field is missing now. The ones that previously had two remained but am unable to add another email address to a contact for anything moving forward.

[Clique_Marketing]

I like how they didn't answer your question but simply moved it to the suggestion area.

It has always been a way to cheat the email count, perhaps they finally wised up and fixed the back door.

[Patrick_W]

Great question KendallTrust,

In an effort to simplify our contacts platform we have moved to a single contact/single email address model. 

The reasons we made this change in a nutshell are due to some performance issues and some painful bugs that customers were running into with the multiple address per contact model we had previously.  Additionally we were receiving feedback from customers that managing multiple email addresses within a single contact was confusing and difficult.

So that I can pass the information along, what was it about the multiple addresses per contact that was helpful for you?

I hope that helps!

Best,

Patrick

[YTA]

I cannot add additional emails for certain contacts, this is extremely frustrating for those with multiple emails. Is there a way to work around this?

[Clique_Marketing]

YTA

Read the thread above yours.

[MelanieF514]

Absolutley ridiculous removing this function.

The majority of our mailing list are now not receiving anything from us.

So if it is now a single email address, what soul we be uploading as, Home? Work? Other? Which field does constant contant use to take the email from?

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[CompCenter]

How do I add 2 or more emails to a new contact.

[AmeliaGM]

What happened to the ability to upload two email addresses in the same import--just like we can import two of our contacts' phone numbers?

[HHIMR]

We want to be able to add multiple emails to one contact. This would allow us to better streamline our account. Also, we want to be able to search the contact list more easily. Currently, every time you go back to the contact list, it makes you start from the beginning instead of taking you back to where left off. Lastly, we would like to be able to edit multiple contacts at once, which would make the purging/editing process easier.

[NMI]

Constant Contact you have been good to us - please don't change that now. In each contact, I have lists and tags and notes and additional info fields that all serve the multiple email addresses. If you make me create a separate contact for each email address then I have to double my time by uploading this additional info each time to the multiple contacts. I use CC both as an email marketing service, but more importantly, as a contact management system. This change completely eliminates the purpose of my second use. If the ability to have a contact with all related info in one place is not returned I will have to find a service that does allow that. Please listen to your consumers and give us this ability back. 

[MarcL273]

Email addresses are now in separate records. This is exactly the OPPOSITE of the features that I've been requesting for the last several years. I wanted a contact ID as the primary key so that I could better track contacts that change email accounts, etc.  Now, I will have to duplicate all the other contact info for a contact with multiple email addresses and lose the history for anyone who changes accounts.  I'm really unhappy.  I've stayed with CC through all the poor UI changes, the cutting of support hours and even falling behind on features.  It's finally time for me to seriously consider alternatives.  Too bad, I liked supporting a company headquartered one town from where I live.  But they forgot to keep putting the customer first.

[4Cs_SEIU]

I also take issue with this change. We have both work and personal email addresses for many of our members and are not allowed by state law to send certain types of emails to work email addresses as our members are state employees. We have added about 60 members since this change has been made and I'm saving their second address in hopes that this decision is reversed. In the meantime, does anyone have advice about a work around? 

[ncregional]

At times, CC is all about businesses and not about school, churches, and organizations. - One contact does not make it in a two parent home. - In the past, one parent could not be entered in different groups even if they had more that one child and, thus , needed to be in more than one group. How wonderful it would be to have workshops geared toward schools and such. I market but your workshops are too intense for what we do here. Thanks for listening!

[MariaI62]

Completely agree.

Our issue is that each quarter, I upload updated emails for our doctors. Now I have doctors in here multiple times with multiple emails, so instead of overriding an old email address, it just adds a new one. So in effect, the old email isn't going away. And at this rate, everyone will have a half dozen emails.

And now, literally 5 minutes after first posting this, I got an email from CC saying our monthly bill is going to increase!

[AngieM087]

I'd like to be able to select 2 contacts that are the same person and merge them.

[lmoffat]

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More than 6 months later and this still has not been resolved. Every export contains 2 sets of columns for email-home and email-other which have to be merged every time in order to upload again after segmenting.

Please get it together CC - you made the decision to refuse multiple email types per contact but you've done nothing to rectify the contacts that already had multiple emails. Either allow multiple emails per contact (and therefore allow multiple email fields when uploading) or fix your mistake and merge existing contacts' emails into ONE field. 

[Patrick_W]

Thank you for the feedback everyone.

At this time we are not planning to bring back this feature (the ability to add multiple email addresses per contact).  There are multiple factors which lead us to this decision.  A few of the major ones are as follows:

- Supporting multiple email addresses per contact was leading to a buggy and confusing experience for many of our users.
- Simplifying the architecture of contacts makes future developments better and more stable
- Allowing multiple email addresses per contact is not an industry standard.

- The large majority of our customers was not utilizing this feature.

I know many of you commenting on this thread were using and relying on this feature.  It's never an easy decision to take a feature out of our product, but in this case we felt that it was the right decision for our customer base as a whole.  

If you have any other thoughts or feedback please continue to share it with us as we truly appreciate hearing from you.

[CamiM5]

I just got access to my work's Constant Contact because I need to send out regular emails to a select group of VIPs. I just learned that the Constant Contact does not allow for a contact to have a CC. This is such a huge problem for this list because all of my contacts have assistants that I need to include. Does anyone have a work around? I might have to use a totally different system if I can't resolve this.

[TISisterhood]

Has there been any resolution to the problem of being limited to one email for each contact?