Why are "existing" contacts excluded from new list uploads?

[MathewD8]

This seems to be a not so recent occurence, if someone is already on one of our other mailing lists, and we create a new one, and upload the contacts from a .csv file, those existing contacts do not get added to the new list, which is super problematic.

We also go to their email address in the contacts lists to manually add them to the new list when we're made aware they were left off of it, and we're not able to manually add them to the new list either - we get an error message from Constant Contact to verify details...

This is very problematic for our event registrations and communicating things only to registered attendees, vs anyone who has every attended in the past.

[William_A]

sHello @MathewD8 ,

If a contact already exists in your account during a file upload import, and the import is set for a list that the existing contact isn't already on, then they will be added to that new list since that is considered updated info / a contact field. 

However if the contact is unsubscribed, then they won't be able to be added to lists during the import and will remain unsubscribed. If you try to manually add the standalone unsubscribed contact to a new list by editing their contact sheet, it will error out.

See also:

Constant Contact's email permission policy

Understanding implied and express permission for CASL and GDPR

[MathewD8]

Except that isn't what is happening... I just manually searched all 29 of contacts that weren't added to the new list from the .csv uploaded vs the list export from my new list.

Only three of those twenty nine contacts were listed in the unsubscribed list.

FOURTEEN of them are in my active contacts and subscribers list, but were not added to the new list.

TWELVE contacts are not in either subscribed or unsubscribed lists, and were not added to my new list at all - their email addresses do not contain any errors.

[MathewD8]

When I attempted to manually add people already subscribed to my mailing lists, I got this error for 3 of the 14:

"Please review the fields below and correct any issues."

There are no highlighted fields, and no errors that I can see except Constant Contact being pretty awful at what it does.

Please note, we run a 14,000+ person event annually, as well as 5 other smaller events throughout the year - this list I compared today was a list of 153 upcoming event participants it took me a good 90 minutes to compare the two lists (the list constant contact created vs the csv file I used to upload the new contact list) and then manually search the subscribed/unsubscribed lists for each of the 29 people who were not added to the new list, and add the folks I was able to from existing subscribers.

To sum again:

3 of 29 had unsubscribed
14 of 29 are actively subscribed, however, I was unable to add three of these folks to the new list, even manually.
12 of 29 are still not subscribed, were not added from the .csv upload

8% of the contacts (12/153) were not created and added to the list, and they are NEW contacts.

9% of the contacts (14/153)are already subscribed to some of my lists and were not added to the new list, despite being existing contacts, of those 21% (3)/14)of them still are not on the list because of an unspecified review error.

2% of the contacts (3/153) had previously unsubscribed, that's fine, I guess they don't want important and relevant event information.

19% of the contacts from the uploaded .csv were not added to the list, of those not added to the list 41% of them are NEW CONTACTS.

What happens when I create a new list with 2,000 people on it, or 14,000 people? How can I trust that Constant Contact is actually adding all of my contacts correctly, without me doing HOURS UPON HOURS of manually checking up. If the ratios are the same, I'd be looking at nearly 20 hours to compare a 2,000 person list; and over 137 hours to review the 14,000 person list.

This is an unacceptable number of contacts that were "skipped" by the upload by csv system, especially NEW contacts that paid to participate in an upcoming event and will now miss out on important details and information going forward because Constant Contact has issues they need to fix.

[William_A]

Then it would indicate there's some other underlying issue that's causing the system to not be able to read the contact info to add them. I'd advise calling in so you can securely provide contact data - including example contacts that should've been added but weren't and those that error in the manual view - and so we can troubleshoot the issue live with you- or to pin down if there's something in the affected contacts that isn't formatted in a way the system will accept. 

[William_A]

Additionally, if you're uploading particularly large lists (i.e. 10k+) you may want to consider reaching out to the premier support team (see this article for more info) for assistance when it comes to those larger imports.