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.
I was able to return to this with a bit of attention today, and I think I'm ready to firmly decide to avoid Contact Point Purposes--all of the above gives me great pause, but primarily, it's that I can't put them in front of patrons within TNEW-based Account pages. What's the point (really unfortunate and accidental joke there*) of having a classification preference set up if the people with the preferences can't interact with it?
This will still leave me staring down what I think we actually should do, but at least I'll focus in on Contact Permissions, with attention to how they're Categorized and possibly Typed. In this moment, but perhaps not the next one, I'm pondering if we do multiple "Email" Contact Permissions, to distinguish between the top-most level usages (e.g. public buyers vs patrons in our education program, so opting out of the former communications doesn't end the latter). Or have "email' repeat in some different categories.
David Geoffrey Hall - despite this, I'm going to try again to ask my clarification question in hopes of properly filing this away in my brain. In your initial reply, you mention Contact Point Purposes AND Contact Purposes, and note that the former is on/off and the latter is yes/no/not asked. Can you confirm that they are truly separate things that happen to have basically the same name? Might you point us to the documentation that defines each, and perhaps the spot that has the TNEW aspect explained? (Asking bc I have tried to look this up, but I clearly can't find the right things.) Thank you in advance.
Also, Gawain Lavers, as usual, your response here was invaluable. Thank you.
*Didn't rewrite it after realizing what I'd done specifically for Heath Wilder
Since I wrote about our plans for Contact Permissions and Hardbounces, they have since been implemented. If you have more questions about our strategy and decisions, let me know!
Accidental - yeah right!