“There will be times when obstacles arise on your path and it is your responsibility to warn those behind you. “- Bryce Ward 8/7/2020

This past week I have encountered a very interesting problem on ClickFunnels. I am still currently working on finding a permanent solution for however I wish to share how this came about and how you can avoid my mistake.

Importing New Contacts

With ClickFunnels you can import contacts from other email services and add them to your email list. However when you go to import your contacts be sure to have the first and last names of your contacts along with their email. Why? Because if you are like myself you use a name command in your email broadcasts to your email lists. For example #NAME# for their full name and #FIRST# for their first name. Emails that are personalized and include a person’s name have a higher open rate of your broadcasts then emails with not the subject’s name. I have noticed that when using the #FIRST# command it does not take the first name from the first name field but from the first half of the full name field.

When you upload contacts that have no name ClickFunnels will auto fill the name fields with Unknown Name. It is no big deal if you are not using a name command however if you do use a name command you end up sending emails saying “Hi Unknown Name.” Embarrassing right? Now imagine sending that to a list of 5,000 people and half don’t have a name recorded in ClickFunnels. Ouch.

How Do We Fix This?

At this time there is no way to fix this issue large scale. If you have only a few blank names then great! You can manually change their names. However for those of us with thousands of unknown contacts this is not a good use of time. One way to fix it is to set a funnel up and email those names explaining the problem and asking them to update their name. This worked very well for myself however I still have a huge amount of unknown contacts who did not update their names.

I know what your thinking why not update the file and add friend to fill in the blank name fields. This does update their first and last name if you are updating contacts in already in ClickFunnels however it does not update the full name. Even deleting the contact and re-uploading the contact does not work. This is because ClickFunnels does not truly delete a contact but instead archives it in case the contact gets reactivated.

As of right now I believe ClickFunnels needs to have an update to allow the user to update the names of contacts in mass. Until then I will have to find a workable fix and avoid using name commands with unknown contacts. Perhaps separating them into their own email list will help. I will have to try this out.

Thank You!

Hey, thank you for reading this week’s post. Have you come across anything strange in ClickFunnels? How did you overcome the obstacle? I would love to hear your stories in the comments down below!

Thank you again for your time and for reading this post!

Have a fantastic day!

Sincerely,

-Bryce Ward