Constituent records come out of a student system, a donor database or a membership roll, carrying graduation years, giving history and department affiliations. Many rows hold two addresses, one personal and one institutional.
Getting the addresses out of Emma
Audience, apply a search or group filter, then Export.
Annually, and before any appeal. Institutional addresses die when people leave, and constituent data ages faster than anyone maintaining it expects.
What Emma does with the file you bring back
The import rules decide what a re-import actually changes, which is worth knowing before you upload.
The short version
- Imports match on email across the audience and update the existing contact.
- Suppressed addresses stay suppressed for every sub-account sharing the audience.
- Custom fields import alongside, which matters for constituent data with many attributes.
- Groups organize the audience without duplicating contacts.
The mistake to avoid
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.
64,000 alumni rows and 91,000 addresses
Say you work in a university advancement office and you've exported 64,000 alumni from the records system ahead of a giving day. Many rows hold a personal address and an old campus one, so the file contains 91,000 addresses. You have to decide which column becomes the Emma email field.
Run both columns through a check. Suppose 27,000 of the campus addresses come back with 11,500 invalid, because accounts were closed a few years after graduation, while the personal column loses only 3,900 of 64,000. Now the decision makes itself: import the personal address where one exists, fall back to the campus address only where it passed, and leave out rows where neither did. Our 100,000 tier covers all 91,000 for $139, and rows that come back unknown aren't billed.
Active, error and opt-out
Emma gives every audience member one of three working statuses. Active members get mail, and opt-out members are the ones who asked you to stop. Error is where bounces go, and replies from Emma's community team say a contact moves there after a hard bounce, or after a soft bounce that still fails on three more delivery attempts. The same replies say only active contacts are billed, so your error and opt-out members don't add to what you pay.
In practice that means there's no billing reason to delete error members, and deleting them throws away the record of why they failed.
If you're arriving from another service, bring your old unsubscribes with you. The route their support describes is to import that file into its own group, select everyone in the group, and change the status to opt-out. That same change status control works in the other direction as well, and a department that flips error members back to active before an appeal is setting up the same bounces a second time. In a shared audience, agree who's allowed to use it.
Questions people ask
Should a university verify before an alumni appeal?
Yes. The appeal is usually the largest send of the year to the oldest data in the system, which is the worst combination for a bounce rate.
What about addresses on defunct institutional domains?
Those fail at the DNS stage, before any mailbox check, and we mark them undeliverable with confidence. On older constituent data they are a meaningful share.
How should departments share verification results?
Import the verdict as a contact field on the shared audience, so every sub-account sees the same information rather than each discovering it separately.