Pros/Cons of deleting all past contacts to start fresh?

[PRHC_Foundation]

Hi there, we are using a Constant Contact account that has existing for several years but was mainly being used for third party event promotion etc, and not for a core email marketing program. We are now regularly using this account for our own email marketing, but still have thousands of contacts from old events that we would not be mailing to now.

Is there any issue with us simply deleting all existing contacts so that we can start fresh? We'll be uploading new lists for each specific email campaign, and I'll take the precaution of exporting our old lists into Excel first, just in case we want to refer to them later on. But we want to avoid being in the higher contact tier (5001-10,000) since we are emailing fewer than 5,000 contacts currently.

Appreciate any insight or recommendations on this, from anyone who has tried this previously. Thank you!

[William_A · Accepted solution]

Hello @PRHC_Foundation ,

The only foreseeable issues would likely be addressed by having the backup CSV files of the lists on hand. My recommendation would be to export each list individually (select all contacts in a list and then export the needed info), and then re-name it accordingly to the list downloaded from. I'd also recommend just doing an export for ALL contacts as well into a single giant list.

Then you can remove all your contacts by selecting all of them and deleting. Then you can reupload the files you need to refill each contact list that you need for your purposes.

[PRHC_Foundation]

Thank you very much, @William_D!