The Unsubscribe Mystery Resolved!

Have you ever had someone respond to an email marketing piece asking you to remove them from your list and complaining that they'd asked to opt-out numerous times, only to look them up in salesforce.com and find out that their opt-out box is ticked?

Well you're not alone. This was happening to me periodically with one of my clients and I couldn't figure it out. So of course the first thing I did was check my report criteria to see if opt-out was equal to false (which of course it was). Then after a lot of research, it finally hit me.

The person, who was a contact in salesforce, had been converted from a lead which meant that they were showing up on my lead report, and my contact report. Even though you can't get to or edit a converted lead, it still appears when you run a lead report! The lead hadn't been opted out, so the report was still picking them up. So if you're sending an email blast to a lead and a contact report, you could run into this issue.

The good news is that there is a super easy fix. Thanks to my buddy Jeremy over at VerticalResponse who pointed out that you can simply set your lead report criteria so that you're only getting unconverted leads. It's as simple as Converted is equal to False. Et voila!