Within Bronto, your contacts can be labeled with a number of different statuses. These statuses make it easy for you to honor the desires of your contacts, while still maintaining compliance. In this post, we’ll go over the contact lifecycle so you can understand it’s intricacies.
When you first import a list, we will add the contacts to your account with a status of Active. You now have an active marketing relationship with these contacts. From there, a number of things can happen. Take a look below for a quick overview.
When you import contacts, you also have the option to have them double opt-in. Choosing this option will cause them to be created as Unconfirmed contacts. When unconfirmed, contacts can only be sent messages that contain a confirmation link. Once they click that confirmation link, they will become an active contact.
Active contacts occasionally bounce, it’s just part of what happens out on the internet. That’s ok, we expect it will happen from time to time. However, if a contact starts to bounce too much, or if we get an Invalid Email Address bounce, then we will mark that contact as Bounced. Once a contact is bounced, you cannot email them. We do this to protect your deliverability and list performance.
Contacts not only bounce, but they also unsubscribe from lists. When a contact does this, we will mark them as Unsubscribed. This ensures that they will not receive any marketing messages from you. The unsubscribe relationship is very important, so even if you delete a contact, we will remember that they have been unsubscribed. This helps to ensure that any accidental re-additions of this contact to your account will not violate compliance.
Speaking of deleted contacts, we do maintain a contact’s information when they are deleted as stated above. If a contact is deleted, then the contact has a state of Deleted. These contacts cannot be sent marketing messages, and they do not count towards your contact count.
There is one last state which is quite special, Transactional. Contacts are added to your account as transactional if you have a business relationship, as opposed to a marketing relationship with them. These contacts can be emailed transactional messages such as receipts, confirmations, or other messages that relate to a business transaction.
Bronto will not allow you to send marketing messages to transactional contacts. An important thing to note is that you can send transactional messages to active contacts. They don’t need to be modified to receive transactional messages.
If you want to see what status your contacts have, you can look at the All Contacts page by going to Contacts->All Contacts. Here you will see exactly where each contact stands.
We try to make the contact lifecycle simple and unobtrusive so that you can always know where you stand with your contacts. Have any questions about the contact lifecycle? Feel free to ask them in the comments section below.
Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto
Update: There was a question about which contacts count towards your Contact Count, it’s easy, only active contacts are counted up when we tell you how many contacts you have.
Related posts:
- What’s Your Contact’s Status? While using Bronto, you may have noticed that the status...
- Suppression Lists Make For A Clean Break Up In the winter 2009 release, Bronto introduced suppression lists as...
- Managing Your Contact List – Let’s Keep It Clean In the world of email marketing, many people assume that...
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
When an email has been moved from active to unsubscribed it is understood that the email would no longer receive marketing email however transactional email should still be allowed. The Pro Edition of the web management does not allow the email status to be updated to ‘transactional’ because such status is not available and has no effect within the api call. What would be the best practice for unsubscribed emails that need to receive transactional email such order confirmation?
Trinh, there is no need to change some one’s status to Transactional. Transactional messages can be sent to any contact within Bronto that has a valid email address. So if some one is unsubscribed, as in your example, you can still send them transactional emails without any change.
The only time you should create a Transactional contact is when you have no marketing relationship with that contact.
Again, because this is worth repeating, Transactional is a state that was created explicitly to identify contacts with whom you have no marketing relationship. For an unsubscribed contact you already have a marketing relationship, and even though that relationship states you cannot send them marketing materials, you can still send them transactional messages.
I hope this clears things up a bit.
Adam