Deleting Old Contact Lists, Campaign Engagement History, and Campaign Stats

[MVEA2016]

Question One: Campaign Engagement History if you delete and then add a contact back: There are a lot of changes to our membership/email list every year. If we delete our old membership lists to remove inactive members/emails, both active and inactive members will be deleted. When we add our current membership list back, to keep our contacts current, will the campaign engagement for those active members / emails be available. For example: We have some active members that have been on email lists going back to 2016, when we delete those old lists, active members will also be removed (until we add a fresh membership list). We want to make sure that when we add them back that we will still be able to see their historical campaign engagement. We have done a couple of trial runs and it looks like the engagement history does "reappear" when an email is added back...but, we need to double-check before moving forward. Question Two: If we delete old contacts/lists, will that impact the stats tied to specific campaigns? For instance, we have a newsletter that we monitor open/click rates for and need to make sure that if we remove inactive contacts that it won't impact the original stats.

[William_A · Accepted solution]

Hello @MVEA2016 ,

Engagement notes are tied to contact IDs, which is our internal way of tracking unique contacts based on their unique email address. If you delete and later re-upload an email address (i.e. a contact), then their prior engagement will be available. 

The only aspect of previous reporting affected by deleting contacts, is that contacts will show with a strikethrough if they're currently not in your account. So if you sent an email to John.Smith@emailaddress.com, then deleted that contact, it'll appear as John.Smith@emailaddress.com in the reporting, and not link to the contact unless re-uploaded back into your account.

[MVEA2016]

Thank you so much! This is VERY helpful!!!

[MVEA2016]

@William_Awe have a related question: If we delete an entire list, not just the contacts in the list, will the list name still show up in the engagement history even if it doesn't as an active list anymore? Thank you for your guidance!

[William_A]

List names will still appear in emails' details reports if sent to them, even if the lists are later deleted.