How to exclude contacts (multiple lists, over 20k contacts)

[user016021]

Hi there. We are running a multi-week fundraising campaign and want to exclude contacts who have already donated. The easiest way to do that would be to run a report in our separate fundraising software of donors to this campaign and then upload that list into Constant Contact, either making a new list or tagging contacts with "Already Donated." 

However, as many have noted, there is no function to exclude contacts by tag or to exclude a list if your account has more than 10k contacts. Many have been advised to use segments. I tried this; I tried making a segment using the "List Membership>Not on List" criteria, excluding the Already Donated list. Upon searching within that segment to check that it worked, I found several contacts in the segment who were also on the Already Donated list. Perhaps this is because those contacts were also on other contact lists? We have around 100 contact lists with a lot of overlap.

Basically what this seems to mean is that for me to send our next fundraising email to only contacts that have not already donated, I will have to download our entire contact list, remove the contacts of those who have donated manually, and upload it as a list. 

This is an extremely frustrating amount of work for a function that other email marketing services simply provide. Am I missing something? 

[user016021]

I'm currently facing a similar problem. I'm baffled as to why there is a technical issue excluding contacts when an account has over 10k contacts. So what you're saying is, instead of being able to exclude a list of contacts, what I'll have to do is make a list of the contacts to exclude, and then create a segment using the List Membership>Not on List criteria, making a segment that, in my case, has all 21,300 of my contacts, minus the 25 or so folks who have already donated to a campaign who we want to stop soliciting? It's just ridiculous. 

[William_A · Accepted solution]

Hello @user016021 ,

There isn't an "exclude list" option regardless of account size, it would require using segmentation. When setting up the segmentation, you'd be wanting to do it with the following criteria:

• List Membership > Is > select the list you'd be sending to
• AND
• List Membership > Is Not > the list explicitly made for excluding contacts that have already donated.

Once the segment is done calculating, it will present the contacts that are on your main list, and exclude the ones you've added to your already donated list. Then you'd send your email to this segment. Each time you add to your already-donated list, and send to the segment, it will recalculate to ensure the most up-to-date info is being considered.

If you're particularly concerned, you can also click on the segment name in your Contacts dashboard to force a manual recalculation after updating your already-donated list. You can also make a list from the current version of the segment, and send to that instead. Additionally, keep in mind that the more contacts there are being calculated for the segment, the longer it may take to process, which can lead to some minor delays in sending.