If you’re creating a new message in Engage, and your draft is displaying zero contacts or excluding your contacts, this is because your Contacts are unsubscribed. Your email or SMS message will not be sent to them, even if an email address or phone number is listed in the Contact.
Why are my Contacts unsubscribed? 🤔
This is often due to a bulk Contact import without including a column for subscription status. The default subscription status is unsubscribed if you don’t specify otherwise - such as if the column is missing or blank. You can download a Contact import template that includes this column.
Note: This guide is intended to address unsubscribes that have occurred as the result of a data import issue. If Contacts have unsubscribed themselves by clicking the "Unsubscribe" link in an email, or replied STOP to an SMS message, resubscribing them can result in complaints that could put your account at risk for compliance issues.
How to bulk subscribe existing Contacts ✉️
Head to your Contacts page.
Select the Contacts you’d like to subscribe. You can select all the Contacts on the page by clicking the box at the top of the list of Contacts.
Click the Actions menu on the left side, and select Manage Engage Subscriptions.
A window will pop up where you can bulk subscribe your Contacts. You can subscribe Contacts to email and SMS messages separately. Don't forget to Save after you make changes!
After this, you should be able to create a new Engage email or SMS draft, without your Contacts being unsubscribed. 🙌
What if I have a LOT of Contacts to subscribe? 😱
If you have several pages of Contacts that were previously imported into Givebutter, you can use the same import spreadsheet to bulk subscribe them!
You'll just need to add an Email Subscription Status and/or Phone Subscription Status column to the previously used spreadsheet and re-import the spreadsheet with the new column. As long as you don't change the Contact information, it won't create duplicates, and it will just subscribe them to SMS and/or Email.
✅ Pro-Tip: Use any one of these: true/on/yes/1 in the subscription status column to subscribe Contacts and any one of these: false/off/no/0 to unsubscribe Contacts.