Unsubscribe & List Question

We're in the process of migrating from GotMarketing (Campaigner) to VR. I have 2 questions relating to this migration.

1) Does VR allow me to upload an unsubscribe list? I want to pull all of the unsubscribes from Campaigner and make sure we honor those as we import lists, move data, etc.

2) We would like to use our lists in VR for snail mail and email. I'm familiar with the email + postcard option, but based on what I've seen, I need to have an email address for every record. Unfortunately this isn't always the case with our data. I could create 2 lists, but I would prefer to have one list to make it easier to maintenance and updates.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Tags: lists, management, unsubscribes

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Permalink Reply by VerticalResponse on March 17, 2008 at 12:08pm: Thanks for your post and welcome to VR. Let me address both of your questions below.

1) We can definitely help you with your unsubscribe file and although there is not currently a way to load this manually into your account, our customer support team can process this request for you very quickly so just send them a quick email (support@verticalresponse.com) with the file and the username for your account. As an aside, we will be adding this feature into our application later this year so user's can load a file of email addresses that are set to "unsubscribe" status and never mailed. But for now, just contact Support and tell them Josh sent you ;)

2) I see the problem you are facing here and yes it's tied to the fact that email address is a required field for the following list types: "Email" and "Email + Postcard." Unfortunately at this time there would not be an easy way to solve this issue and boil things down to a single mailing list as you would either need to fill in dummy data for the missing email address info (probably not a good plan) or you'd have to load the list as a "Postcard" list but that would prevent you from using this data for email campaigns. I know you didn't want to create two lists but I think the only way to get around this would be to create an Email + Postcard list for those records that have an email address and then add the remaining folks into a Postcard list.

Sincerely,

Josh Feinberg
VP, Product Management
VerticalResponse, Inc; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by VerticalResponse on March 17, 2008 at 1:26pm: Thank you -- the info you provided is very helpful.

One more question -- is it possible to UPDATE the information in a list using the "append file" feature? It doesn't appear as though this will work. Here is the problem I'm trying to resolve. I have an email list in VR containing information on teachers that my organization communicates with. The email list contains custom fields that we plan to use for list segmentation -- such as grade levels taught. We update this data in a web-based system on our web site. I was planning to periodically dump the data from our system and import into VR, but it looks like if an email address exists in VR, nothing is appended for that record.

I'm thinking the API might be what I need to look at, but I wanted to see if I was missing something.

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Permalink Reply by VerticalResponse on March 17, 2008 at 1:26pm: Right now there is no "update" function that will sync records to bring in newer field data and as a result if you attempt to load the same email address twice it will reject it as a duplicate. This is however going to be addressed with a List Management upgrade around Q2 '08 and the actions you described will be possible right from within your account. You'll be able to update/merge/overwrite, etc.

Understanding that you might need/want to move faster, I'd like to introduce you to Allen Corona (Sales Engineer) as he'll be able to answer all your API-related questions. His email address is allen@verticalresponse.com and we currently do have a method called: "editListMember" which would enable you to solve your issue via the API while we work on the front-end UI implementation.

Sincerely,

Josh Feinberg
VP, Product Management
VerticalResponse, Inc; ▶ Reply to This