Bringing your list over from Constant Contact

If you already send email through Constant Contact, you can move your list into VMX POS in two steps. The import looks at your Constant Contact account first and tells you exactly what will happen — nothing changes until you say so.

The two steps run in a fixed order, and the order is the point:

Bring over the people who unsubscribed — they go on your do-not-email list so they're skipped automatically.
Bring over everyone still subscribed — their sign-ups are recorded here, so you can email them from VMX POS the same way you do today.

Constant Contact is the service the import connects to today. Coming from a different email service? You can still protect your unsubscribes by uploading a CSV on the Suppressions tab — see Importing from a file.

Before you start

Email Marketing must be turned on for your store — see Email Marketing.
Your Constant Contact account must be linked on Configuration → Integrations. If it isn't, the import page shows: "Constant Contact isn't connected yet. Link it on the Configuration → Integrations page, then come back here."
Anyone with View Marketing access can scan and look at the numbers. Actually running either import step needs Edit Marketing access — otherwise the page says "You can look, but you'll need someone with edit access to run the import."

When your Constant Contact account is connected, a banner on the Marketing pages reading "Another email marketing service is also connected to this store" offers a Bring your Constant Contact list over button — that's the way in. (The banner is a heads-up, not a problem: many stores run both systems while trying this out. Just remember an unsubscribe in one system does not reach the other until you run this import.)

Scanning your Constant Contact account (read-only)

Click Look at my Constant Contact account. This reads your contacts — it takes a moment on a big list, and a progress bar shows how far along it is. Scanning changes nothing; it's a preview you can run as many times as you like (the button becomes Look again).

The scan shows three numbers, in the order they matter:

people unsubscribed there — contacts who asked Constant Contact to stop. VMX POS doesn't know about them yet, and the card shows how many of them would get your very next email if you did nothing.
people we can't email yet — contacts still subscribed at Constant Contact who match a customer record here, but whose sign-up isn't on record yet. Bringing their sign-ups over lets you email them from VMX POS. (Contacts with no matching customer record aren't counted — the import never creates new customer records.)
your list, before and after — how many people you'll be able to email once both steps are done.

If you see "Your account is very large — we read as much as we could in one go. Run this again after it finishes to pick up the rest.", the scan hit its per-run limit. Finish both steps, then run the whole thing again — repeat runs only ever add, so this is safe.

Step 1 — bring over the people who unsubscribed

This step adds everyone who unsubscribed at Constant Contact to your do-not-email list, so they're skipped automatically on every send — unless they sign up again themselves.

This has to happen first. If sign-ups came over before the unsubscribes, your first campaign would go to people who already told you to stop — which is exactly the thing that gets a business marked as spam.

Click Preview to see what would happen without changing anything — for example, "1,200 to add, 40 already on the list." The Add them to my do-not-email list button stays unavailable until you've previewed.
Click Add them to my do-not-email list.
A confirmation dialog spells it out: these people asked Constant Contact to stop, so they will be skipped on every email from now on. Choose Add them (or Not yet to back out).
The dialog stays open and shows live progress while the addresses are written, then confirms how many were added.

You can remove someone individually later from the Suppressions tab. And if one of these people signs up with you again and confirms it from the email they're sent, they come off the list automatically — signing up alone isn't enough, which is deliberate: it means nobody can be put back on your list without their own click. See Do-not-email list.

Step 2 — bring over everyone still subscribed

This step records that your still-subscribed Constant Contact contacts signed up to hear from you, so you can email them from VMX POS. It's locked ("Finish step 1 first.") until step 1 has actually run — trying to skip ahead is refused with: "Bring their unsubscribes over first — otherwise this would start emailing people who already opted out."

Check the box: These people signed up with us — at the counter, on our website, or by asking to be added. This is a real assertion about your own customers, not a formality, and it's recorded against your name — the Copy the sign-up records over button stays unavailable until it's checked, and the import itself refuses to run without the confirmation ("Please confirm these sign-ups are genuine before importing them.").

Note

Your previous email service can't make this assertion for you. Most of them record only that an address is on a list, not when or how it got there — so the question is genuinely about what you know about your own customers.
1. Click Preview to see the numbers first — for example, "3,000 sign-ups to bring over, 45 skipped (on your do-not-email list)."
2. Click Copy the sign-up records over. The dialog shows live progress, then confirms how many sign-ups were recorded.
3. When it finishes, See who you can email takes you to your Lists — the import doesn't create a new list; it changes who your existing lists can reach.

A few things worth knowing about step 2:

It matches by email address. A sign-up is recorded for customers already in VMX POS whose email address matches a subscribed Constant Contact contact. It does not create new customer records.
It can't undo step 1. Anyone on the do-not-email list stays there, even if Constant Contact also shows them as subscribed.

"Please confirm where your imported list came from"

If you imported a list before this confirmation existed, a yellow bar appears at the top of every Marketing page until someone answers it. Click Read and confirm, read the note, tick the sentence, and click Confirm. It takes a few seconds and the bar goes away for good.

Here's why you're being asked. Earlier versions of the import asked you to tick a box saying your previous email service held the records proving those people signed up. For most accounts that isn't true — services like Constant Contact typically mark contacts as added by the business rather than collected through one of our forms, meaning they hold no sign-up record at all. The wording pointed at them when it should have pointed at you, because you're the one who knows how those addresses were collected.

Confirming changes nothing about your list. Nobody is removed, nothing is re-sent, and your existing records are kept exactly as they were — the confirmation is added alongside them, not in place of them. What changes is whose name is on the claim.

If you run an import from now on, this is recorded as part of the import and you'll never see the bar.

If the import doesn't finish

If a step fails partway, you'll see "That didn't finish" — with a specific reason when the system knows one, or "Nothing was lost — you can run it again." Either way, that last part is literally true. Both steps are safe to re-run: they only ever add, never remove, and anything already brought over is counted as already on the list rather than duplicated. The page also remembers which steps have completed — after a reload you'll need to run the scan again, but step 1 stays done and step 2 stays unlocked.