Import Acme Point of Sale customers and tags into Constant Contact for personalized marketing.
Prerequisites: -You should already have a Constant Contact (CC) account and already have gone through the process to Export Customer / Contact Tags using one of the Constant Contact templates. Acme works with Constant Contact Basic or Essential (recommended).
Notes:
-If a contact in CC has more than one email address, campaigns are sent to the address highest in the contact's list of addresses. The folks at CC refer to this as the contacts "primary" email address. They do not have a field that designates an address as primary. Similar logic is used when importing contacts into CC, if there is more than one address in the import data CC expects you to map the primary one to their topmost field, see leftmost column in screen shot below. For this reason our templates only include one email address and we use a fill and drain method with CC. While this burns your history in CC
CC uses "Lists" but a contact cannot be imported into a list if they are already on a different one, the incoming contact would be discarded as a duplicate. This doesn't mean that contacts can not be on more than one list at a time. Far from it, it is just that adding them to additional lists is done from within CC.
Lists are used for campaigns. You would for example want to have a GENERAL INTEREST list that contains all customers and then more granular lists that are more personalized.
Subsequent imports of same contact update the existing record. The email field is used for matching. If email is missing (not just from the file, but from the mapping itself) then first and last name is used. This is how you add Acme tags to existing CC contacts.
If a contact is ever unsubscribed you cannot re-subscribe them or re-import them, even if you delete them from your unsubscribed list.
They can re-subscribe themselves via link in one of the emails you previously sent them or via CC "join my mailing list" link you add to your website.
You can send text (SMS) messages via Constant Contact using an add-on product from the Constant Contact marketplace. If you wish to import contacts that do not have email addresses make sure you do not include an email field in your import. Also make a note to look for them under >Contacts >View All Contacts, not under Contacts >Email Lists which is more prominent on the page.
To import contacts:
Log into Constant Contact and on their menu click >Contacts >Add Contacts >Add From File.
-follow the on screen steps. At any point you can click HELP & Tips on the Constant Contact menu.
Click the "Choose File" button and select the file you exported in the prerequisite step.
(unless you changed the default this is in your Acme data folder and the file name starts with "nexus...")
When you get to the "Add Contacts from File -Organize" screen you will have an option to name the LIST of contacts you are importing, some examples would be: Newsletter, Spring Sale, Frequent Shoppers Club, etc. Warning,
Related Topics
See Deliverablity and SPAM for other important information.
