Add, edit and delete contacts

Contacts, lists & segmentsUpdated

Add a contact by hand, edit their details and lists, unsubscribe them, and what happens when you delete one.

From Contacts, click New contact to add someone, or click any address in the table to open their page. The contact page is where you Edit, Unsubscribe, Delete and Erase…: four different things, and the last two are not interchangeable.

Add a contact

  1. Contacts → New contact.
  2. Enter the Email (the only required field), plus First name and Last name if you have them.
  3. Fill in any of your custom fields shown below the divider.
  4. Under Add to lists, tick the lists this person should join.
  5. Click Create.

New contacts are created as subscribed. Adding someone to a list here enrols them in any automation that triggers on joining that list.

Edit a contact

Edit changes their email, names, custom-field values and list memberships. Status is shown but not editable. Two things the checkboxes deliberately won’t do:

  • Unticking a list a recipient opted out of doesn’t remove their opt-out, and re-ticking it doesn’t undo one. Only the recipient can reverse a per-list opt-out, from your preference centre.
  • Ticking a list for a contact who hasn’t confirmed yet doesn’t confirm them. A pending signup becomes subscribed when the person clicks the link in their confirmation email.

Unsubscribe someone

Unsubscribe appears for subscribed contacts only. It opts them out of everything on your account and adds a suppression, so a later CSV import can’t quietly put them back. There’s no undo from your side: the recipient opts back in themselves, or not at all.

Delete vs Erase

Delete takes the contact out of your account: they disappear from the contacts table, your lists and your segments, and stop counting towards your plan.

Erase… is the right-to-be-forgotten action. It permanently removes the person’s details, including their name on every past send and report. It cannot be undone, and it’s one contact at a time. See Erase a contact (right to be forgotten).

If someone just asks to stop hearing from you, Unsubscribe is the correct action: not Delete, and not Erase.

Bringing a deleted contact back

Deleting is reversible, even though the confirmation dialog doesn’t say so: add the same address again through New contact and the original record comes back with its history, and you’ll see “Contact restored.”

It does not reset their status. Somebody you deleted while they were unsubscribed comes back unsubscribed. Delete-and-re-add is never a way to clear an opt-out. A name or custom-field values you add on the restore form are applied on top; blank boxes leave what was stored alone.

What’s on the contact page

  • Profile: status, source, subscribed date, and your custom fields. A Suppressed badge here means that address is skipped on every send whatever the status says. A Platform-wide badge next to it means the block came from a permanent bounce and covers all of EmailFig. See Suppressions.
  • Lists: every membership with its own status.
  • Tags.
  • Activity: recent delivery, open, click, bounce and unsubscribe events for this person.
  • Signup consent: if they came in through a signup form, when they submitted, when they confirmed, the IP address, the page, and the exact consent wording they were shown. This is the record to reach for when someone disputes having signed up.

Where to go next