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.
I know that we capture both in Tess from Prospect2 - I assume because we promote every email and that information is captured as an activity.
We use P2 and are not syncing P2 to permissions mostly for that reason that you address: many email addresses to 1 constituent record. However, with Contact purposes being more of a 1 to 1 relationship, we would probably feel safer syncing our bounces/unsubscribes via purposes.
For unsubscribes, it's interesting because we might unsubscribe a patron via an automation, simply because they haven't been engaging with us over a set period of time. This was an unsubscribe that we did, and not a patron marking as an unsubscribe. We do this for reasons around deliverability and we don't keep sending to contacts that are not engaging. However, I might not want this kind of automation unsubscribe to write back to Tessitura.
Thank you, Michael! So you are using Contact Point Purposes rather than Permissions? It seems Tessitura wants us to move toward the latter, which is constituent-based rather than email-specific, which is my hesitation! We currently are using Permissions.
It might make a difference if you are on P2 or Wordfly. What are you currently using?
We're on Wordfly, but I'm not sure if that matters in this case. I know that it CAN write back to Tessitura. I'm just not sure if it should.
Thanks Jean. I am thinking about the integration points and how each platform, Wordfly/P2 integrate back to Tess. Also depending on how each organization stores and pulls data, that might dictate if permissions are more important than purposes, or vice versa.
While we will be using permissions as an organization because we have to for V16, we will probably skip the P2 integration of contact permissions. I do think for us as P2 users, the strength of purposes will be much more useful for us.
Hi Michael, we do a similar thing at Queensland Symphony Orchestra; however, instead of unsubscribing someone who is inactive, we instead add the tag 'Disengaged' - this all falls part of an automation where if they haven't opened any of our emails over a certain period of time AND they haven't visited our website then we enter them into this automation that gives them a 'Disengaged' tag. For most emails we send to those with the 'Engaged' tag - essentially those who have visited our website recently or have opened our emails recently. On certain emails where we are promoting more popular concerts, we will send to our whole database in a way to try and lure our disengaged contacts to re-engage. My concern with unsubscribing someone if they are disengaged is that it makes things blurry regarding re-subscribing them - plus, you're going to have a higher unsubscribe rate which might affect your deliverability.
That's just my opinion - there is of course many ways to go about it.
Hi Jean and all -
My main excitement about the switch away from permissions on the General Tab is that we will finally be managing all these details per contact point rather than per constituent. It should be a game changer in terms of the mentioned situation of someone having multiple addresses logged and simply opting out of one or more in an act of housecleaning rather than ending a relationship.
Because the required move from the General Tab into Contact Permissions and Purposes means that we have to update the syncing procedure between WordFly and Tessitura anyway, I'm intending for us to also invest in making sure it's executing the way we need in terms of categorizing addresses after hard bounces and in regard to multiple instances of the same address on a single record, across household:: individual records, and (of course) true duplicate records. Hard bounces, and anything more of a "bad data" logic, will get a categorization of that--Unsubscribe will be strictly held to mean "permission revoked," as legal compliance is a very different story than, say, a typo like .con taking an email out of your lists.
I've just closed a support ticket with WordFly related to this, and they've mentioned "Tessitura is currently developing a new default implementation of the stored procedure." Might someone from Tessitura expound on this? Even just a confirmation of intention and a heads up about when to look for news of it would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Jamie! I may not be totally following what you're saying here - but best I can tell in V16, the Contact Permissions work exactly the same, aka they apply to the constituent rather than the specific address or email.
This is my constituent record from our v16 test environment. So it's still the blanket "Permission To Email: Yes/No" which I find too broad.
Contact Point Purposes DO exist, which we haven't explored in part because it seems like Tessitura is urging us to move away from it.
Jean, I'm curious what makes you say that Tessitura is urging you to move away from Contact Point Purposes. I've been doing a lot of research into both CPPs and Contact Permissions recently as part of the upgrade to v16, but I haven't come across anything that indicated a preference for one or the other. I know Contact Permissions were added to meet GRPD requirements and to replace the restriction fields on the general tab, but so far everything I've seen seems to indicate that Contact Point Purposes best for opt-ins/out by email and by interest area (Newsletter, Deals & Discounts, etc). Has Tessitura said anything directly to your organization about going away from CPPs?