My own company contacts are showing as unsubscribed - when they didn't

[MeganM440]

I have lists and segments for employees from my own company. I noticed some contacts that were in the lists one day, no longer appear. I can see these contacts show up under the segment I put them in, but not the list in which they were first added. I decided to just try the "Add New" contact for one, and received a message that said this contact had been unsubscribed. I never unsubscribed them & they did not unsubscribe themselves (I've spoken to them). When I tried to "resubscribe" them, I received an error message that something went wrong on Constant Contacts side and to try again later. Why would these contacts have been unsubscribed in the first place and how can I fix that? I don't like that if I have to resubscribe them, due to an error from CC, that I only get 1 shot to do so and they now have to approve it?

[William_A · Accepted solution]

Hello @MeganM440 ,

If we received an unsubscribe request from a contact, we have to honor that for legal and compliance reasons - even if they don't remember doing it, or they forwarded their email to someone who did it using their email address, or their email program decided to unsubscribe them after they met a certain criteria.

If a contact has been marked as unsubscribed from you, you'll need to go through the resubscription process. However the easiest method for a contact to resubscribe to you would be for them to go through one of your sign up forms, either a landing page form or one coded into your website.

If they’re unable to get signed back up through a sign up form or through the resub email, you can request our Review team do a manual override of the unsubscription. You’ll need to get an email directly from the contact explicitly stating they want to be resubscribed. Then you’ll need to call into the Review team, and follow their processes from there.

Since there are a number of legal and Compliance-related elements to unsubscribing and resubscribing, we have to make sure one of these three processes is followed.

[LetsGoFairhopeAL]

I am having the same problem, but regarding my OWN address. After I sent out my new business campaign from my business address, my own PERSONAL Gmail email addresses (which was in my contacts) is now showing as unsubscribed. I didn't unsubscribe at all. I did not forward it as mentioned in the "solution." To add to this problem, if I know I didn't unsubscribe from my own email list, but I'm now unsubscribed, how can I confirm the other contacts listed as unsubscribed actually did?

[William_A]

Hello @LetsGoFairhopeAL ,

I'd advise checking your email settings for your Gmail account to make sure you don't have it set to auto-forward emails from it to another address. I'd also advise checking your email settings to make sure you don't have it set to automatically unsubscribe you after a certain number of deletions without opening or other protocols that Gmail and other email programs offer. 

If you have any external programs set to automatically sync contacts to your account, check those as well, since some integrated systems that have a contact marked as unsubscribed on their side may update that contact's permission status within your Constant Contact account. 

Since there are a number of legal and Compliance-related elements to unsubscribing and resubscribing, we have to honor when we receive an unsubscribe request for an email address to a specific account.