Drew Ross: Hello everybody. My name is Drew and today we're going to talk about issue contacts. So what are issue contacts? They are contacts that have statuses like bounced, unsubscribed, spam report, or opted out of text. And if you're wondering about like best practices when it comes to like reputation and not becoming labeled as a spammy sender, please check out our mass emailing best practices video because that talks about that in detail. Here we're going to be primarily talking about how you can look up contacts that have any of these statuses. So you can just identify people who have these statuses and you can either flag them as uh unsubscribed and also you can um unfl flag them as well if you want to be able to try to uh send to these people again. Um so uh there are lots of different places in VIP cloud that you can uh see the contacts that have these uh issue statuses. And so we're going to be walking through how you can see individual contacts uh that have that need to be uh managed.

Drew Ross: um contacts that are in contact or entire contact lists, entire mass emails across your entire account. Also, if you're new to Viploud, but you have an existing uh system that you're using that has an unsubscribe list that you want to upload, we're going to show you how you can do that. Um, and we're going to discuss a couple of other things beyond that, too. So, I'm going to share my screen. All right. So, we're going to start with individual contacts. Of course, you can always search for a contact up here. If you're wondering if some individual person, maybe they've reached out to you and said, "Hey, I'm not receiving your emails." This is a good thing to check as a first precaution. Also, under the contacts button, you can then go view your contacts. And we've got our contact that I want to look at right here. So, we're looking at the contacts table and you can see in that left column that there's a bounced badge under our contact bugs bunny here.

Drew Ross: Let's click and look at that contact record. Again, at the top of the contact record, you can see a bounced badge and you can also see a bounce reason underneath that. So this is uh the the reason that this particular email bounced. So that's really useful for troubleshooting. If you're not sure what these mean, you can uh send these bounce reasons to us and we'll be happy to give you pointers. So let's override this contact. We're going to be able to do that by scrolling down a little bit. In the details card, there is a bounced row that says yes. So yes means that yes, it has bounced there. Next to it, there's an override button and we can click that override button. And now it'll say bounced. No. Something to note here too is we're going to refresh. Notice that the contact no longer says that it bounced, but um you know you you will be able to see that this email has bounced by looking at the contacts.

Drew Ross: uh communication history here in the recent activity. So it says that the email bounced. You can see that right there on the left side. So this is useful for um you know just like being able to retrace your steps and seeing that this contact did in fact bounce in the past because occasionally we do see people who send emails to people maybe like on a monthly basis and one person on the team unbounces this particular contact but then later on the contact writes in saying hey why didn't I get my newsletter from a particular month and and then they go to check the contact, they see, oh, well, the person didn't bounce. Well, you can see right here uh that the person bounced in the past and that would be why they have not received that particular newsletter. All right, let's look at mass emails. We can get there by going to the communication tab, clicking on mass. So this is useful if you want to see uh what the issue rate was for a given mass email that was sent.

Drew Ross: So we can look at our mass email here. Issues column. We can see that this particular one had 12 issues. We can click on it and now we can manage all of the issue contacts for a given mass email. Note that if you're sending say like a newsletter and you are um just sending it on a monthly basis or something like that, these contacts that have issues, unless overridden, they're not going to be receiving subsequent mass emails that are sent to that list. So that is something to uh to keep in mind uh that this is kind of like it it snowballs basically all of these issues if it's going to a particular contact list. So, uh, speaking of which, let's go take a look at our contact lists. We're going to be jumping back over to the contacts tab in the sidebar, clicking on contact lists, and we're going to go into this newsletter list right here. So the way that you manage your issue contacts as it pertains to a contact list is right up here under the filter view.

Drew Ross: When we click on this, we'll see that you got all contacts. That's going to be absolut like every unique instance of a contact in the contact list will be found here. But then when we break down here, uh these are our segments of contacts for this contact list based on their primarily based on their status as an issue contact or not. So active for emailing means that this contact has an email address and they have there's no reason for us to think that they aren't going to receive the email. They haven't bounced, unsubscribe, any of that stuff to date. So uh that means that when you hit send email to this contact list, it's going to send eight emails in this particular instance. But when we go down, we can see that there are six who have bounced. And then you can go into these contacts and override them if you have a reason to believe that this person will perhaps receive an email going when you send it the next time. You'll also see your unsubscribe.

Drew Ross: In this case, there are none. And we got an undeliverable here. And then also people who don't have any emails at all. All right. We're going to go to lists of issue contacts. So that is right here. So maybe if you have a keen eye, you'll have seen in the contacts. Here we have an issue contacts button in the sidebar which shows us bad emails, bounces and unsubscribes. So in this particular account, we don't have any examples of bad emails, but those are going to be, as you can see right here, emails that just have bad formatting for any particular reason. like there might be multiple at symbols or perhaps no at symbol or things like that, just bad syntax. Our system generally stops you from being able to import or or from being able to create contacts that are like that, but I think you might be able to import uh some examples like this. Then we've got our bounces. So, these are going to be people who you've sent an email to and for any number of reasons it was not able to be delivered.

Drew Ross: You can search these bounced contacts. You can export them and also this is a place where you can go to override them as well. So, this is going to be basically like just your your entire if you're if if you're wondering of if you're wanting to find a list of just every single person across your entire account who has had an issue with bounces, this is basically the place that you're going to want to go. And so, you can search for them by name, you can override them from here in the left column. You can click on their their name to go to their contact record. And you'll of course also see their bounce reason too. So this is a useful place for um just managing all of your bounces. Same goes for unsubscribes. When we click here in the left sidebar, you can see everybody who has unsubscribed from receiving emails from you. Now, we're going to go to a contact filter view that is in every account by default, which is consider deleting.

Drew Ross: And this is very similar to what we were just looking at before. This is going to be every single contact in your account that has that has bounced, unsubscribed, spam reported. And also the one thing that is in addition to this is if you are an enterprise user and you verify your contacts, contacts that fail to verification will also be featured in your considering table. So, some people like to remove their contacts um if they have any kinds of issues like this. And we'll be talking a little bit more about that in a second. So, lastly, I want to show you how you can import your unsubscribe list. So, that is in the contacts tab of the sidebar. Click on import and then you'll see an unsubscribe list option right here. as it is described up in the blue box at the top of this page. Uh it's a very very simple import. All you need for that import is for it to be a CSV file that has a single column and at the for the top cell of that column write email and then just list out all the emails that you want to add to your unsubscribe list.

Drew Ross: If you're importing from a new system and you want to also include your bounces or anybody who you just want to make sure you don't send emails to going forward, just include them in the unsubscribe list and they'll all be treated the same. Uh and and you'll be able to ensure that you don't accidentally send a mass email to any of those people. And the last topic here is um you know when people delete issue contacts sometimes they wonder what will happen if they if this person somehow winds up being imported again in the future. Well our system will remember anybody who is on your unsubscribe list your bounce any of these issue contacts. our system will not forget that status and if they do get imported again a contact will be created but they'll still have that status. So if you want to delete those people uh you really don't have to worry about accidentally emailing them again in the future. Um one thing I will note there is don't delete them necessarily just because you want to like free up space in your account or like capacity. um you just like marketing contacts are how your like how your contact how your account is limited to certain numbers. That means basically if these contacts are on a contact list, they'll be counted as a marketing contact. So as long as you just take them off of your contact lists, they're not going to be taking up any capacity. You can have as many CRM contacts is what we call them, uh as you need to within reason, of course. to maintain those particular numbers and stay below a certain limit. Just do it. If it's a matter of housekeeping for you and you just really don't want to have their data in your system. All right, well that about wraps it up, of course, reach out to us. If you have any additional questions about any of these matters, we will be more than happy to help. Thank you.