Welcome
Login  Sign up
Open navigation

Avoid Contact Quarantine

What is Contact Quarantine?

If you already have 10,000 contacts in your Signpost account, and add a list of more than 1,000 contacts in a 7 day period, you will see a section at the bottom of your Contacts tab labeled "Pending." This is what we call Contact Quarantine. This means the contacts will not receive marketing campaigns while they are "Pending." Any contacts added from a payment capture or recent customer action (phone call, SMS) will be excluded from being quarantined.  

Why does Signpost use a Contact Quarantine?

Email deliverability rates depend on the “reputation” of the account that emails are sent from. Lists with large amounts of contacts are at risk of containing email addresses that are no longer in service, putting the reputation of the account and future deliverability rates at risk. We occasionally hold some recently added contacts from large list uploads in a short-term “quarantine” to ensure that your account’s reputation and deliverability rates are not negatively impacted.

How to avoid the Contact Quarantine

We understand that some types of businesses have a higher volume of active contacts than others. If your contact list is naturally large, there are a few things you can do to make sure that your contacts make it into your active contact list for follow-up as quickly as possible:

  • Only upload email addresses of contacts you've interacted within the past 2 years. This ensures that the contacts entering your account are more current, decreasing the likelihood that their accounts are no longer in service. (Contacts from over 2 years ago may not remember the service they received from you anyway.)
  • Clean out contacts from no-reply email addresses. Many large companies use unique, one-off email addresses or no-reply email addresses to deliver important account information or messages from other site users. Since these email addresses cannot accept email replies, sending marketing messages to them hurts your email account reputation. Delete all email addresses with the username "noreply" or "no-reply," as well as any email addresses that are unusually long or contain a lot of numbers, before your contact upload.
  • Only upload email addresses of customers—avoid vendors, business contacts, etc. Since these contacts have not had a customer-related experience with you, they are unlikely to respond to the types of messages and offers we send on your behalf.
  • Do not upload lists of leads purchased from a third party. Signpost does not allow you to add purchased contacts into your account because this violates the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which prohibits sending unsolicited marketing communications to contacts who have not previously interacted with your business or provided their contact information directly to you. (Lists of this nature usually contain a large number of fake contacts anyway.) Note: Leads from sites such as Angie's List and HomeAdvisor are fine to upload since the contacts forwarded from these sites voluntarily elected to learn more about your business.

What to do if your contacts are Quarantined

Contacts added to your "Pending" tab will be automatically transferred to your subscribed marketing list at a rate of 1,000 contacts per week, so there is no need to take any action. 


Did you find it helpful? Yes No

Send feedback
Sorry we couldn't be helpful. Help us improve this article with your feedback.