How to prune emails/contacts that have orders, but keep the order record?

Max Classic
#1

I have quite a few contacts that were originally collected because the customer ordered something. I haven’t heard from them in years and even some of them have bounce back emails now, so I expect they’ve moved on and forgotten about us.

I’d like to remove the contact from our list, but keep a record of their order. My thought was to merge all these contacts into a single catch all contact that will hold all the orders that were made by these people, but I’d have to do that one at a time. It would take much too long. Maybe I could mass update them to all have the same phony email address, then some auto-merge could be triggered?

The primary reason to do this is that I want these orders to show up in reports, but no longer want to bother pretending that these contacts will re-engage with us.

Any ideas are appreciated.

#2

Use the orders report to identify them and apply a tag to all of them…then in the contacts list, do a search for all contacts that do NOT have that tag.

You then will have a list of all contacts with orders and all contacts without orders. You can delete the ones with orders or just make them unmarketable so you don’t send emails to them any longer.

#3

That sounds like it would ensure that I don’t email them anymore, but it wouldn’t prune them from the list, which is what I want to do. I want my list to only contain emails that actually matter to me. I want these emails out of the list, but I want a record of the order to remain, mostly so that sales reports don’t change.

This also would have the issue of conflating emails that have been marked as unmarketable by infusionsoft. I’d have to depend on a tag as well when searching for these emails, or more accurately, I’d have to remember to exclude a tag. Depending on me remembering to exclude something is not ideal. It would be much better if I could just eliminate them entirely.

#4

That’s assumed because it’s the law that you keep records of sales by CC for five years. It’s never recommended to actually delete contacts additionally because it represents history and your successes and failures to analyze and target marketing. In business that’s standard fare.

But as I said, you will have separate lists to do with what you wish…including deleting the list with the sales/order tag.

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#5

Okay, there’s some sense in your answer, indicating that maybe I need to adjust my thinking. I’d rather just consolidate the orders and toss the contacts, but since there’s no limit on the number of tags I can create, I suppose tagging is probably the best way to isolate this contact type that I’m generating.

BUT … it’s not an issue now, but if I grow and get multiples more orders than I used to, hanging on to these dead weight contacts will actually represent a real cost in the future. IS does limit the number of contacts I can have without upgrading my account. Whether they’re under five years old or not, I’d favor deleting unengaged contacts over purchasing a higher tier to hold on to them. It would be nice if a consolidation feature existed that preserves the orders. Or a specialize export; something that would export all the contacts and their orders, then delete them, so that you don’t technically break that 5-year law.

Thanks again.

#6

Hi, @DVM,

It’s a common response to “don’t delete contacts” position to say it represents added cost. What is missing from that is that if you’re truly generating that many contacts then your revenue should more than justify the nominal cost as acceptable overhead. If you’re not generating that revenue, then the problem isn’t in the overhead, but rather in the sales process.

So my hope for you is that more contacts equals more revenue :wink:

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