LOLDavid

Email marketing is a big part of our business. Over the past six years we've built up over 80,000 subscribers and about 20% of our business comes from marketing to them. We follow all the guidelines of the CAN-Spam Act and all of our contacts are opt-in. We've used Constant Contact and just yesterday they froze our account. They said an ISP contacted them and some emails on our list were listed on their blacklist.

So Constant Contact basically gave us two options. 1. Age our account by deleting every email that hasn't been registered in the past year; or 2. Send out an opt-in email to all our of our customers and if they don't reply then they are effectively unsubscribed. Both of these options would decimate our lists and kill our email marketing.

They said it might be due to the fact that older emails had bounced too many times and ended up on a blacklist. We had no idea such a thing could happen and Constant Contact does a horrible job of letting you know that this thing could happen if you don't remove your bounced emails. And they provide no data beyond 90 days regarding bounced emails so there is no way to retroactively go and delete these bounced emails that were possibly blacklisted. They give you no warning or time to get this resolved. All they do is freeze your account and more or less tell you to hit the road. Is there any recourse? Or would switching from Constant Contact be our only option? It seems cruel that they would do this to a legit customer of 6 years.

gayan

Some times they getting crazy... just drop a email and ask bro.. there is another company name VeMail in Australia ... if you want to change your account i think they are one of best... just try ... www.VeMail.com.au Me and Our company (Digital Glare) getting service from them...

LOLDavid

Thanks for the reply. We're looking around at other options currently just in case we can't get things straightened out with Constant Contact. Here's an update:

Constant Contact has currently allowed us to keep the following segments of our list: all contacts that subscribed in the past year + all customers that purchased from us in the past 18 months + all subscribers who have opened an email in the past 90 days. Which it looks like is going to equal about half of our 80,000 subscribers. The rest of the email list we'll have to send a confirmed opt-in email which is apparently not successful with the majority of subscribers. They are not allowing us to keep the emails of all our paid customers which we are disappointed with.

From the reading I've done around the web it is the Email Service Provider's job to keep their user's lists off of blocklists provided the user is abiding by all anti-spam policies. So I guess Constant Contact has not lived up to their end of the bargain here and they do not have the leverage with ISPs or blacklisters to tell them that we are a legitimate company and not a spammer even though they have all of our numbers which have spam levels below the industry average and they can clearly see and demonstrate that we are not a spammer.

Also the fact that they only have data on the contacts that have opened an email in the past 90 days and have bounced in the last 90 days is very unfortunate. Data is cheap and you would think a company the size of Constant Contact would keep this data going back all the way back into a user's history and not delete it off their servers. It's like Google Adwords deleting data from your advertising history. I doubt companies like MailChimp or Aweber have such a practices with their analytics.

So it looks like we'll have to cut down our list of six years by about 50% (40,000 contacts) and see what the results are.

dave

I'm just wondering if you have a copy of all your emails offline?

I'm not a fan of keeping data on 3rd party services, say an ISP closed down my server due to X or Y i've got a backup of ALL my websites, data and configuration. I keep almost everything on my server and don't trust 3rd parties to keep my data.

I've got an aweber account but don't trust them to keep my big lists and always take a copy of all the emails (even if i have to get them manually / scrape the data)

A properly configured server / dns (SPF records etc.) shouldn't have issues handling the number of emails you have. You should then check the email logs for bounced messages and remove those from your list (or if there is another problem, resolve that issue).

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