I've gotten a few (five to be exact) emails this morning from disgruntled folks who tried to opt-out of our weekly newsletter and are still getting it.
First, my sincere apologies to them, and any others who weren't PO'd enough to say anything. We're committed to respecting email permissions on user accounts.
For those who care, explanation of why and current state follows:
We started out in our infancy managing email subscriptions by hand. That method was almost flawless, but labor intensive, especially as our list has grown.
This past summer we switched to Constant Contact, who is the off-the-shelf standard these days. That worked well (I thought) except that the email creation was a pain and there was a major shortfall in their list management from our point of view, and from that of some users. Their "Safe Unsubscribe" feature is quick and handy, but it's either all-on or all-off. So you couldn't opt out of Daily You promotions without also losing the weekly newsletter.
To rectify that, we switched a few weeks ago to a new Mac OSX program called Direct Mail 2.0. There seem to be a couple potential problems in this transition: One is that although we thought we got all of the opt-outs from Constant Contact imported, either CC wasn't opting everyone out, or we missed a few in transition -- people opted out on old emails after we'd switched. The other is that either the Blacklist feature on Direct Mail is not working properly or I'm somehow botching it.
Please email me directly if you're having trouble. If you already have done so, you'll hear from me as soon as I'm positive you are out of the database.
Comments
Mike Orren Staff
I should note that about 24 hours after this post, I heard from Eric Groves, Constant Contact's Senior Vice President Worldwide Strategy & Market Development to see if he could help with any issues we had.
Glad to see someone else who follows their press online and then talks to people when a potential problem is identified.
His kind email made me realize that I was sounding harsh about Constant Contact when I didn't mean to -- I'm a big fan of their service and recommend it to any of our customers who also have direct email needs.
The pain I referred to in email creation is due to the fact that a.) we put in far more links into the weekly email than most Constant Contact customers so find the WYSIWYG system cumbersome and b.) we find it much easier to do something that integrates tightly with our proprietary content management system -- Both issues that are largely unique to us and wouldn't be a negative for 99.99% of Constant Contact customers.
My unsubscribe issue is similar in that it is due to our need to distinguish between many sub-lists within a larger list that is first and foremost for site login and also happens to be an opt-in email list.
So my issues were not faults in CC's service, but differing needs from what they offer.
Eric handled this perfectly -- he was helpful without being pushy and is kicking some of our suggestions up to their tech folks. I still highly recommend Constant Contact -- and now I have a real human contact there.
No matter what your business, the Interwebs are, indeed your customer service center.
9 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )
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