If you use any version of 1ShoppingCart (including all the private labels), check your total contact list numbers.
Last week they did a sweep to remove hard bounces (bad email addresses) from all systems and we have discovered that their process removed active clients as well. They are looking into it…
What this means:
- Not only were “hard bounces”/bad email addresses taken off your account (since they lower the overall deliverability rate), active clients were taken off of all auto responders when they were set to “do not mail” status by the sweep. This means you may have paying clients or prospective clients not receiving the information they signed up for. For example, our Get It Done Right Community autoresponder dropped by 10 subscribers despite no one cancelling. Luckily a Team member had just printed labels for our monthly print newsletter mailing and so could match the labels to the cart and see who had been taken off.
- You’ve lost the ability to properly segment your broadcasts for everyone who was affected. If “Susie” was on 5 autoresponders and one of them relates to a basic product for which you have an advanced version coming out, you can not send a topic-specific email to her. That autoresponder is no longer tagged to her account within your cart.
- The broadcast before the sweep showed I had under 20 “fails” (meaning less than 20 people had either a hard or soft email bounce). The sweep was supposed to take off “hard” bounces (bad email addresses). If that were the case, the number would be less than 20. The number for me was 280. I have no idea who those other people are so we can add them back.
We have escalated this within the Cart’s support system and recommend you look into your numbers and do the same. Our goal is to have them reverse the sweep. The more people who call, the more of a chance we have of getting our subscribers back.
Note: If you use another service for your email broadcasts and 1ShoppingCart (or any version of) as your shopping cart, you are still affected to the extent you are using the Cart’s autoresponder feature when someone purchases from you.
How to tell if you were affected:
- While we can’t tell you how many/which autoresponder unless you recently exported a list (like we did for the GIDR Program), you can check your overall figures. Go to the most recent “all contacts” broadcast you sent prior to March 25th (in the Broadcasts tab). How many people was it sent to? (Note: If you haven’t sent anything out since January, this won’t be as telling for you.)
- Go to your Cart Home page. How many subscribers do you have today?
- The difference will be whatever the sweep took plus your additions minus any unsubscribes since March 25th.
The sooner you do this exercise, the closer to the total number you’ll be (given new opt-ins and unsubscribes). We’ll continue to update this page as we learn more from the Cart.
And then comes the ultimate question — Do they have the right to take subscribers away from users? Would love to hear your thoughts below.