Your contacts are the foundation of your email marketing plan. Your ultimate goal is to send them personalized communications with content that is relevant to them.
Contacts are unique email addresses in your account. Contacts can be just an email address or they can be numerous data fields such as first name, zip code, product preference, etc. While contacts are essential to a successful email marketing campaign, don't fall into the trap of thinking more is better. Equally important to having contacts, is how you manage those contacts. After all, if you send your email to 1 million people and none of them end up buying anything, then the fact that you have 1 million contacts really doesn't mean anything. Think about it, would you prefer a list of 100 contacts that continually interact with you and make purchases, or would you rather have 1 million contacts that rarely open your emails and never buy anything? That being said, don't just throw out your list because the majority of the contacts on it don't ever interact with your messages. Rather, try figuring out ways to engage these contacts with more targeted messaging. Remember, a key part of a successful email marketing campaign is not just having contacts, but properly managing those contacts with tools like segments and fields, so that you can realize the greatest ROI (return on investment) from your campaign.
There are several different versions of the All Contacts page. Depending on whether you are viewing all contacts in your account, on a list, or on a segment, there may be some slight differences on the All Contacts page. Below is a description of the All Contacts page and the features that appear, depending on whether you are viewing all the contacts in your account, on a specific list, or on a specific segment.
If you go to Contacts->All Contacts you will be taken to the version of the All Contacts page that displays all of the contacts in your account.
You can sort the table on the All Contacts page by clicking the Active, Inactive and All tabs on the table.
Active contacts are "live" contacts that can receive messages from you. Inactive contacts cannot receive messages from you and are given one of three statuses:
A contact can be given one of the three inactive status types for any of the following reasons:
The Status column on the table on the All Contacts page indicates whether or not you are able to send messages to a particular contact. If you are able to send messages to a contact, then they will have a status of active. Active contacts are "live" contacts that can receive messages from you. If you cannot send messages to a contact, then they are Inactive.
To reactivate an inactive contact, begin by locating the contact using the search function on the All Contacts page, or by clicking the Inactive tab on the table on the All Contacts page. Once you have located the contact you wish to reactivate, click on the email address associated with that contact. On the Contact Overview page, click the Activate button to reactivate the contact. This will give the contact a status of active, however, you once again need to get permission to send mail to the contact via a subscription confirmation. There is no way to reactivate a large number of contacts at once. This is largely due to the seriousness of an unsubscribe request and the legality of re-subscribing someone who has unsubscribed.
The Delete button on the All Contacts page lets you delete contacts. When you delete a contact, they are no longer visible in your account and will not receive any of your emails.
The Unsubscribe button on the All Contacts page lets you unsubscribe contacts. When you unsubscribe a contact, you give them a status of inactive. Although they remain in your account, they can no longer receive your emails.
The Add To List button on the All Contacts page lets you add a single contact or multiple contacts to an existing list or a new list.
The Remove From List button (Only available when viewing all the contacts on a particular list) lets you remove a single contact or multiple contacts from the list you are viewing.
The Export link lets you export a report based on either all the contacts in your account, all the contacts on the list you are viewing, or all the contacts on the segment you are viewing.
The Create Contact link lets you create a new contact in your account.
Creating An Individual Contact
Based on research we have done, we have developed an automated onboarding process that let's you ease into adding and sending to new contacts, all while allowing you to easily spot problems along the way should they occur. Importing/adding new contacts is often a risky proposition and can have serious negative impacts on your deliverability, delivery rating, and sender rating. Because of this risk, we developed the automated onboarding process in such a way that assesses the legitimacy of new contacts at an ever increasing rate, provided they have no negative impact on your account. On the other hand, should they prove to negatively impact your account, we will will slow the rate at which contacts are assessed to provide more time to determine the cause of the negative effects.
As a practical example, you can think on automated onboarding as similar to the carry-on baggage scanners at airports. Provided the scanner operator doesn't spot anything potentially harmful, bags move quickly through the scanner and the line at airport security also continues to move quickly. However, if something harmful is spotted, the conveyor on the scanner stops, the rate at which bags are scanned is slowed, and the line at airport security moves at a slower rate. Automated onboarding is very similar. Provided the assessment goes well, contacts will very quickly move through the onboarding process.
Previously, we limited the number of contacts that could be added to 25K. If you wanted to import more than 25K, you needed to manually break up your list. We realized this could be a burden, so now we allow you to import/add as many contacts as you like.
The steps below explain what happens once add/import new contacts into your account: