COMMUNITY ADVICE FOR ZOHO CAMPAIGNS AND BEST PRACTICE HELP NEEDED PLEASE!
We moved our CRM and marketing operations over to Zoho in June of this year. In doing so, we moved over our marketing email lists, built over years and containing opt-ins from many marketing campaigns as well as current and former customers.
In doing so, we have run into numerous issues in trying to send to these same folks we have imported, using Zoho Campaigns. Our account has been blocked so many times, and the review and resolution period so lengthy, that we have effectively been without the ability to email market to our database for more than a month... and counting.
We have attempted to work with the support team on "cleaning up" our list for weeks, following all advice, and it seems that we have finally been un-blocked. But now the support team require that we request a double-opt-in for all EXISTING and remaining members of our lists (thousands of folks, again years of marketing efforts) otherwise they're threatening to shut us down AGAIN. In addition, they are saying we should only include these folks in ONE campaign.
This poses a number of problems and would love to hear from other companies about how they have solved them.
- Requesting a double opt-in would require an action on behalf of these thousands of existing subscribers, to basically re-subscribe. We all know that, effectively, this will result in our list dwindling significantly, losing years of work in building it.
- Our list contains existing customers. We need to be able to email them re: service updates etc... If they "opt out" this is entirely impractical.
- We have an integration built in with Zoho CRM and have leads coming directly to our sales team from Web-to-Lead forms. We add these leads automatically to Campaigns (one of the very reasons we moved to Zoho in the first place.) Must these folks also receive a double-opt-in confirmation when we do this? I can't see that being very effective, can you?
- Further, we use the CRM integration to pull in new customers, again resulting in issues mentioned in #2 and #3 above.
- Regarding including subscribers in only one campaign -- how is THIS practical? We have folks who are members of more than one list. Do we have to essentially remove them from all other lists?
Our email marketing manager is incredibly frustrated and essentially paralyzed by this process. At this point it looks like we may need to move our lists back to a 3rd party email company that integrates with Zoho (something which we moved to Zoho to avoid) because we seem to be stuck in an unworkable situation.
How have others out there dealt with these issues?