Contacts and lists

Contacts are the people your campaigns go to. Lists are how you group them, so "customers in Lagos" and "everyone who ever signed up" can be mailed differently.

Each contact has an address, optionally a name, and a status:

• Subscribed — will receive campaigns. This is the only status that gets mail.
• Unsubscribed — asked to stop. Skipped, permanently, unless they ask to return.
• Bounced — the address failed. Skipped, to protect your reputation.
• Complained — marked your mail as spam. Skipped.
• Pending — not yet confirmed.

A contact can be on several lists at once, and each list shows how many contacts it holds. Campaigns are addressed to lists, not to individuals.

Custom fields let you store more than a name — a company, a city, a renewal date, as text, a number, a date or a yes/no. Those become the merge tags you can use in a campaign, and each field can carry a default value, which is what a contact with no value of their own receives. Setting a sensible default is what prevents "Hello ," going out to a few hundred people.

Importing tells you how many contacts were added, how many were skipped as invalid, and how many you already had.

1. Go to Contacts.
2. Import the people you already have. A CSV of addresses and names is enough to start.
3. Read the import summary. Skipped-as-invalid usually means malformed addresses in the source file — worth fixing at the source rather than here.
4. Create lists that match how you will actually mail. Two useful lists beat fifteen aspirational ones.
5. Add custom fields for anything you want to personalise with, and give each one a default value.
6. Import your unsubscribes and bounces from your previous provider into Suppressions before your first send. This is the step people skip and regret.
7. Check the list count before scheduling a campaign, so the recipient number in the pre-send check is not a surprise.

Someone is not receiving campaigns. Check their status. Unsubscribed, bounced and complained contacts are skipped on purpose. Also search Suppressions, which applies across everything.

The import added far fewer than expected. Read the summary. Duplicates are counted separately from invalid addresses, and both are usually explained by the source file.

A merge tag is empty for many people. Those contacts have no value for that field. Give the field a default, or fill the values in.

Someone asked to be removed. Unsubscribe them and, if they were emphatic, add them to Suppressions. Honouring it quickly is both the right thing and the cheap thing.

You want to mail everyone at once. Ask whether you should. Mailing an entire history that has not heard from you in a year produces complaints, and complaints cost you the inbox.

• Campaigns — sending to these lists
• Suppressions — the do-not-mail record
• Go to Contacts