Contacts, lists and tags: how they fit together

EmailFig keeps one record per email address on your account: the contact. Everything else organises those contacts. A list is a group you can send to. A tag is a label you stick on contacts across lists. A segment is a saved set of rules that works out who matches, fresh, every time it’s used. A custom field stores extra data on each contact.

Only lists and segments are audiences. A tag on its own can’t be sent to: you wrap it in a segment.

The four building blocks

	What it is	Where it lives	Can you send to it?
Contact	One person, one email address, one record per account	Contacts	Not on its own
List	A named group with its own consent settings and signup forms	Lists	Yes
Tag	A free-form label; a contact can carry any number	Tags	Only through a segment
Segment	Saved rules (status, list, tag, engagement, signup date) evaluated on every use	Segments	Yes

All four sit under Audience in the sidebar. Custom fields live under Settings → Custom fields.

One address, one contact

An email address can appear only once on your account. Import the same address twice, or add it after a form signup, and you update the existing contact. That one contact can be on any number of lists and carry any number of tags, which is why it has two kinds of status:

• Account status is the contact’s own status: subscribed, unsubscribed, cleaned or pending. It applies everywhere.
• On this list is the membership status for one list: subscribed, unsubscribed or pending. Someone can be subscribed to your account and unsubscribed from a single list.

Open a list and you’ll see both columns, plus a Subscribers count and an All members count that differ for this reason. See Contact statuses explained.

Which one do I want?

Use a list when the group has its own consent. People sign up to a list, opt out of a list, and a signup form points at a list. Double opt-in is a list setting.

Use a tag when you’re describing a contact. “Attended the March webinar”, “prefers plain text”. Tags cost nothing, don’t affect consent, and a contact keeps their other tags when you delete one.

Use a segment when the answer is a rule, not a hand-picked group. “Subscribed contacts on the newsletter list who haven’t opened anything in 90 days” is a segment, re-evaluated every time it’s used, so it never goes stale.

Use a custom field when you want to store a value. Plan, city, renewal date. You can drop one into an email as a merge tag. You can’t build a segment rule on one (the rule kinds are status, list, tag, signup date and engagement), so to target people by a value, apply a tag as well.

How this shows up when you send

A campaign’s audience is the lists you pick plus an optional segment, added together and deduplicated: the control is Also send to a segment. Someone on two chosen lists gets one email. Every send also filters out anyone who isn’t eligible: contacts whose status isn’t subscribed, contacts who opted out of a list you’re targeting, and any address on your suppression list.

Where to go next

• Create a list
• Use tags to label contacts
• What is a segment?