On Suspended Emails

[VirginiaL08]

Hello,

I don't know your systems well enough to know if the following idea is possible but here goes.

I read your documents and listened to the video about suspended emails. I then took one key suspended email (an advertiser with us) and asked him to check with his provider to see the status of a Constant Contact email that was suspended in our bounced reporting. We then went back and forth and he with his provider to see if the problem was on the provider's end. The provider was unable to find anything from Constant Contact.

So, I unsuspended the email and we tried a test email to only Keith. The provider and Keith never saw the email. So, today I called you for help. I was on the phone with the first Rep (Kumar) for about half an hour explaining the issue and the steps I had taken. He then turned me over to a rep who could help. Both interactions were positive and both reps were very cordial and provided excellent customer service. The second Rep solved the problem and took Keith's email out of a back-end database that had Keith's email in it since 2018.

I have had Keith in my contact list since April 2023. None of my emails every reached Keith in the past month and it wasn't Greater Hillsborough Senior Services that caused the initial problem in 2018. I believe it might have been the Constant Contact list for the Greater Hillsborough Chamber of Commerce here in NH as Keith has advertised with the Chamber and also is now advertising with the seniors.

Here are my suggestions for improvements.

1.   When an email is added to a contact list, run the address through the back-end database to be sure it is considered valid by Constant Contact so no customer starts out in a contact list with a suspended address.

2.   Provide an email service where instead of contacting Constant Contact by phone every customer who has gone through specific steps and checks off that they have done this can place an email in a field to have the email run against the database so answers on status is displayed - date suspended etc. and the customer can asked to have the email reinstated. This list can then go to reps trained to remove valid email addresses from the back-end database so they will work once again. The customer can then be notified when the address should be good to go again.

I would hope that one or more of these suggestions would help both Constant Contact and Customers save time on suspended emails. Overall this one email took over 2 hours of my time in back and forth and time waiting for a rep and waiting for the solution. Over an hour could have been saved of my time if you had a field available to input so I didn't end up taking an hour of queue and rep time.

I hope these suggestions are given a thorough review and implemented in some way - maybe a better way. I assume that your programmers have already discussed suspended emails to the breaking point as this is one of most people's sticking points. Hopefully there is a better solution, not necessarily mine.

Sincerely

Virginia Leiby

[Caitlin_M]

Hello @VirginiaL08. Thank you for the feedback! This would be useful for customers as they manage their contacts and bounces.

I'm not able to see what exactly was discussed during your conversation but it seems there was a mention of using an unsuspend tool. Did either agent mention you can unsuspend an email address in your account without needing to call support? There can be a delay of up to ten minutes to update their sending status so you would need to wait before doing another send to the contact.

[Caitlin_M]

Response from @VirginiaL08 "Yes - it was mentioned but I already did that and after unsuspension on my end I tested a new email which the provider and my advertiser both said never arrived. So I turned to support with a phone call at that point."

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Thank you for the reply. In this case, it sounds like more of a delivery issue rather than functionality.

With the request to have notification of a suspended address, would this be during the upload process or a notification appearing when scheduling an email with a warning of possible suspended contacts that would not receive the email? This will help us narrow down where in the account a potential update to managing suspended contacts would appear.

[Caitlin_M]

We have not heard back from you so we will be closing this idea. If you can provide us with more information about your request, please let us know by commenting below.