Hello! I'm curious how everyone is handling bounces and unsubscribes, from a contact permission perspective. Do you have that information synced between Wordfly/Prospect 2 and Tessitura?
My hesitation is that contact permissions apply to the constituent level. But many constituents have multiple email addresses. So it may be that only one email is bouncing, and/or they meant to opt out from a particular email address rather than their entire record.
However, because we don't have that information written back to their record from Wordfly, sometimes we are promoting emails to an account that won't actually receive it.
I'd love thoughts on this! I had asked around at TLCC this year and it didn't seem anyone had much of a solution, but perhaps there's something that's missing.
To be clear, we currently handle bounces and unsubscribes poorly. We are approaching the end of a process that will allow us to handle them much better.
First, there are two kinds of bounces, soft and hard. Roughly, a soft bounce equates to a delivery failure, while a hard bounce is something like a response from the address' server saying that the address does not exist. According to my notes, a long time ago industry guidance was to translate certain number of soft bounces into a hard bounce, but this guidance changed, and now we simply ignore soft bounces.
We used to de-primary, inactivate, and change the EAddress Type on hardbounces. Our new plan is to de-primary and inactivate (this does not prevent logging in with the login tied to this EAddess in TNEW, incidentally) the EAddess, but instead of changing the type we are going to add a Contact Point Purpose of "Hardbounce". We already have a Contact Point Purpose Category of "Contact Point History" that we used for flagging changes in mailing address. This way if the customer contacts us about not receiving email, the representative can see the address and why is no longer being used.
These days (this was not always the case) when you get responses back from Wordfly (and I presume Prospect2) you will get (along with other things) the customer_no AND the email address in question. For hard bounces we intend to flag every email address that matches the returned email address, regardless of the customer record it is on.
For unsubscribes we are planning to send to customers to a communication preferences screen where they can be explicit about which communications they wish to unsubscribe from. These will be handled by Contact Permissions. Instead of "Email, Mail, Phone", we use those as Contact Permission Categories, and have defined Permissions under those that each incapsulate a distinct set of communication types that we send as an organization.
I certainly have some concerns about the fact that customer records may have multiple email addresses. Also addresses may be inherited from the household account. However, I think Contact Permissions are the correct tool to use. It's important to distinguish between the detail available on the customer record and the customer's view of their account. Absent a custom site, through TNEW customers are only able to see and set a single email address, on their account, and that address will be set as the primary address. Contact Point Purposes can be set by Wordfly, and (weirdly specifically) by TNEW for Mobile Phones, but effectively they can only be assigned manually by users, and it is really their purpose to handle odd edge cases for VIPs. "Send this here, and that there, and only mail those." sounds like a great feature, but building an interface for customers to manage it themselves would be a nightmare (can you think of an example of a major retailer that allows this?) and especially a lot of work for the 0.001% of your customers who would actually want to muddle through it.
We reserve Contact Point Purposes to very specific cases where we have a customer who generally interacts with us as a customer, but whom we also have a separate relationship with wherein we might want to address them by a different channel. An example is our PR contacts. These people might well be local customers, but also, say, be a critic for a local new organization. They buy tickets for themselves using personal accounts, but when our PR department wants to contact them, they will want to use their company address (if it isn't the primary), and so a Contact Point Purpose is perfect for this application.
An issue to consider with managing unsubscribes, whether you use Contact Permissions or are somehow using Contact Point Purposes, is that the unsubscribe is going to naturally be processed for the customer in question, but the email address might be floating around on numerous other customer accounts in Tessitura, either unmerged accounts, family members, etc. I don't have a good answer for this yet, but I think some action should be taken on those accounts, maybe another "Contact Point History" Purpose assigned to the address on the other accounts.
Thank you for all of this detail, Gawain! Very interesting. I have been wondering about a Contact Point Purpose for "bounce," so it's great to hear this process. Two questions about that:
1. When you are flagging these, is it a manual process to add that CPP? Or will you somehow have Wordfly write that info back to the record?
2. For purposes of list pulling and extractions, will you be then suppressing those somehow? If a contact has multiple email addresses but one has a CPP of "bounce," how do you handle as a criteria?
And then regarding the Unsubscribes, how are you sending customers to this screen? Is this through a Wordfly feature of some kind?
With Wordfly (and I suspect Prospect2?) responses come back into Tessitura, and when they do, they trigger a stored procedure called LP_UPDATE_EMAIL_RESPONSE, which is designed for you to overload with your own code. That's where we make the hard bounce change.
For lists and extractions, by default only primary, active email addresses will be pulled, and we'll be setting these emails to not primary and inactive.
We initially also used LP_UPDATEW_EMAIL_RESPONSE to record unsubscribe responses, but when we make our updates the "unsubscribe" links in our emails will send them to our Wordfly Preferences page, where they will be presented with a set of our Contact Permissions to update.