Cleaning a list before it reaches Constant Contact

Constant Contact files tend to come from a community: members, donors, event attendees and people who signed a sheet at a stall. The export is small enough to read by eye and old enough that reading it by eye tells you something.

Contacts, select a list or all contacts, then Export. Constant Contact produces a CSV with the fields you choose.

Before an annual appeal or a membership renewal push. Those are the largest sends of the year against the oldest records in the system, which is the worst pairing for a bounce rate.

Some addresses come back unresolved, and that is a fact about the receiving server rather than a gap in the check. We label those and never bill for them. What that means, and why roughly 28% of business addresses land there, is set out on our page about catch-all domains.

Picture a rowing club with 850 active contacts, sitting inside the 501 to 1,000 tier. The membership secretary finds a spreadsheet of 210 lapsed members and wants them invited to the anniversary dinner. Import all 210 and the account reaches 1,060.

Here's the part that catches people. Constant Contact's billing FAQ says pricing follows the highest number of active contacts you had during the billing cycle, whatever the count is at the end. So if 70 of those lapsed members bounce as non-existent on Friday and get removed, you've still crossed the line for that cycle. Check the 210 first and suppose 64 are invalid and 22 unknown. Import the 124 that passed and you land on 974. The club stays in its tier, and the free 100 checks a month would cover half that spreadsheet before you spent anything.

Constant Contact keeps a record of every address that unsubscribed from you, and deleting the contact doesn't erase it. Re-import that person and they come back as unsubscribed. Their email policy treats resubscribing someone who didn't ask for it as a violation, so there's no workaround worth trying.

Moving from another provider? Their knowledge base describes importing a file of unsubscribed contacts as its own step. Do that before the main import and your old opt-outs carry across.

Unsubscribed contacts don't count toward billing, since only active ones do. Removing actives to get into a lower tier works slowly, though. Staff replies in their community say a contact has to be gone for a full billing cycle before the total reflects it, so a cleanup in the last week of a cycle won't show on the next invoice.