Where better to vent than your blog?

Generally, I love Constant Contact. We use it for our own newsletter, flyte log, and we recommend it to our clients and anyone who will listen.

However, there is at least one really, really frustrating element of CC. I currently have a subscriber base of about 1,250. I also have over 550 people who have signed up for flyte log through our Web site but didn’t confirm their subscription. Since I "brought" about 250 subscribers when I moved to CC, that means that about 1 out of 3 potential subscribers aren’t completing the transaction.

Why didn’t they confirm? Maybe they decided they didn’t want it. Maybe the confirmation email went right into their junk folder. Maybe there was a drop of service and it didn’t reach their inbox. Maybe they didn’t read the confirmation email and they didn’t realize that they needed to click to confirm.

The list is long.

What would I like to do? Send out an email to all of these people and ask that if they want to receive a copy of:

• The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make,
• 10 Questions to Ask Before Setting Up a Web Site,
• The 11 Commandments of Writing Web Copy for Non-Copywriters,
  and the PowerPoint handouts from the seminar How to Plan, Build and Promote a Business Blog

plus access to our ultra-exclusive flyte log subscriber area they’ll need to confirm their subscription. (BTW, if this piques your interest you can subscribe here.)

Unfortunately, by emailing these people–whether through Constant Contact, another email service provider, or one-at-a-time through my own email program–would violate my agreement with CC and they would terminate my account immediately!

Seems a little heavy handed.

I understand that they need to take extra-precautions against people using their system to send spam, but this seems over the top.

CC’s response was that I could call them all or send snail mail to them, assuming they had left that information for me during the sign up process. (We only require email addresses.)

Well, that’s obviously not going to happen. There should be a tool at CC that allows me to send "reminder" messages to potential subscribers once (maybe twice); if they didn’t respond they would be automatically deleted off the system. After all, this is a marketing tool. I should be able to market to people who expressed interest in flyte.

Constant Contact: are you listening? Your user base is speaking!

Rich Brooks
Constant Contact Reseller

Tags: Constant Contact | Email Marketing