Consent records for constituents with multiple email addresses

Patrick Kelleher-Calnan

I am working on a consent record and solicit code clean-up project. I just noticed that email consent records are not coded to a specific email address. This has the potential to cause errors for users with multiple email addresses, for example if someone is trying to unsubscribe one email from our list but not another. It also makes figuring out the history of someone's consents a bit more challenging.

Has this issue come up for anyone? Any recommendations or best practices?

Austen Brown

@Patrick KelleherCalnan - At least through NXT Email Marketing when an email unsubscribes, it is marked with a DNC coding (appears in Database View). I recommend this option for tracking specific emails that have unsubscribed.

As for Consent Coding/Solicit Codes - how you have this set up depends on your definitions of “unsubscribed” since it sounds like you track this by email instead of constituent, I recommend not having a solicit code tied to your consent record and you track this on the email level. You can keep the consent records as back-up documentation.

Steve Townsend

@Patrick KelleherCalnan we have a similar issue as we have joint records for our alumni parents, i.e. one spouse is the primary and the other is only a relationship record. We have email address type email for primary and spouse email for the spouse. We use Online Express for our emails - when someone unsubscribes, it adds a consent record and we have it set up so a solicit code of Do not Email is added automatically. If this happens on a joint record, I have to manually remove the solicit code, then we use DNC to exclude the specific email address. It sounds like a lot of work but actually doesn't happen all that often.

Steve Townsend

@Patrick KelleherCalnan however for multiple email addresses for the same person it seems a lot simpler to me - we only include one email type in mailings, Email, and any other address would have a different email type. So if someone wants to unsubscribe one email and use another, we would just change the email types so that the one in use is Email.

Patrick Kelleher-Calnan

@Steve Townsend @Austen Brown Thanks Steve and Austen, that is helpful. We're using Constant Contact for our email, so it's not adding DNC to specific email addresses. As in Steve's case the overall number of records I'm looking at here is not large, so I will likely keep my current configuration and consider ways of double checking folks with multiple email addresses on file.

Christine Robertson

@Patrick KelleherCalnan You could use the free version of @David Zeidman's Importacular to import the unsubscribes. You can match the email address to the one in RE and mark just that email address as DNC that way.

David Zeidman

@Christine Robertson Thanks for the shout out. Yes, Importacular can be used to import the DNC status. If you would like any more information about our product then please do not hesitate to get in touch via our website https://www.zeidman.info and I or one of my colleagues will be in touch.

Patrick Kelleher-Calnan

Thanks @Christine Robertson and @David Zeidman, I've looked at Importacular in the past but hadn't considered it for this task. I will take a look.