Newsletters and Importing Lists

I have a question when it comes to newsletters and importing email lists.



If I import a list of contacts into mautic, I have a field that is labeled ie STATUS. and based on that status (prospect, reseller, customer), the lead will be added to particular lists that are set up.

Then, I email out a newsletter to a particular list. I can then trigger certain actions if they open the newsletter or do not open the newsletter.

Based on what I have seen, I am assuming all this works.



My main question is:

Can people unsubscribe from all the lists? Meaning, they never ever get another email from me and is this permanently saved?



Also, the following month I import the same list of leads (I am exporting this list from our CRM). Can these lists I am importing match to duplicates in the database and overwrite the values if they are different. For example, a STATUS of a person may be a Prospect but then in our CRM we changed to Customer. Can Mautic overwrite the change, and then automatically remove that person from the PROSPECT list and move them to the CUSTOMER list?



And most important, if a person asks to be removed from the list, will it retain this selection so even if they change to a customer or some other value changes, that particular EMAIL is still unsubscribed? If I start a different campaign or add that person to a different list, the Mautic system knows that the email is unsubscribed and will never get an email unless I manually go in or there is a form that re-subscribes them?

I have a question when it comes to newsletters and importing email lists.

If I import a list of contacts into mautic, I have a field that is labeled ie STATUS. and based on that status (prospect, reseller, customer), the lead will be added to particular lists that are set up.
Then, I email out a newsletter to a particular list. I can then trigger certain actions if they open the newsletter or do not open the newsletter.
Based on what I have seen, I am assuming all this works.

My main question is:
Can people unsubscribe from all the lists? Meaning, they never ever get another email from me and is this permanently saved?

Also, the following month I import the same list of leads (I am exporting this list from our CRM). Can these lists I am importing match to duplicates in the database and overwrite the values if they are different. For example, a STATUS of a person may be a Prospect but then in our CRM we changed to Customer. Can Mautic overwrite the change, and then automatically remove that person from the PROSPECT list and move them to the CUSTOMER list?

And most important, if a person asks to be removed from the list, will it retain this selection so even if they change to a customer or some other value changes, that particular EMAIL is still unsubscribed? If I start a different campaign or add that person to a different list, the Mautic system knows that the email is unsubscribed and will never get an email unless I manually go in or there is a form that re-subscribes them?

Hi Versadial

I had a long reply all typed up and it got lost because my session logged out!

Anyway here’s what I found out. I did a bunch of research to test all the things you asked about:

Unsubscribes work by unsubscribing to an email. So in reality the lead is kept on the list regardless of subscription status. But, any email you send to a list will not be sent to a lead who has unsubscribed, regardless of the email or list that you’re using. Unsubscribed will prevent them from getting any emails in the future.

I tested htis by creating leads in Mautic, then creating the same leads in a spreadsheet, using the same emails, and submitting conflicting data for their phone numbers. The CSV import data overwrote the Mautic data.

if you’re using a smart list which uses a filter then the list will always be current based on the value of the lead data. So for example if you are filtering for lead-type with possible values of prospect and customer, and that value changes per-lead on import, the change should be reflected in the list.

Yes - I tested a lead who had unsubscribed, imported that user via a CSV import and the unsubscribed state was retained through the import.

Yep, Mautic will know the email is unsubscribed and won’t send them anything while they’re in that state.

I have additional question to this one - how to import list of contacts already marked as unsubscribed? Let say I have two lists in files, one of current subscribers and the second one, in which contacts who don’t want to get our messages are stored. I want to import both of them, second one especially because I want to keep track with who we was in contact and who doesn’t want to be addressed.

Currently I don’t think we have a good way of handling a do not contact on import. The easiest thing to do would be to add a custom field for those leads and then add them to a smart list so you know who they are, and then maybe use a ‘not’ filter on your other leads lists so they don’t get emailed. I do think we need to be able to have this on-import so this works better though. Mind adding it as a feature request here?

https://github.com/mautic/mautic/issues

Sure I can, but prior to that I would like to better understand how do-not-contact flag/feature works internally to be sure I will describe all my use cases etc. as deeply as possible. May you please say a little about that? Maybe just short description if it is just flag somewhere or if some kind of deeper logic takes part in run-time decising if customer falls in contact or do-not-contact category may be enough?

Issue created on the Github https://github.com/mautic/mautic/issues/324