Contacts

Contacts are the people you send emails to. Every subscriber, customer, or lead you communicate with through SendBeam is stored as a contact in your workspace. Your contacts list is the foundation of your email marketing — the better your data, the better your results.

SendBeam gives you a central place to view, search, and manage every contact across all of your lists, campaigns, and automations. Changes you make to a contact are reflected everywhere that contact appears.

What is a contact?

A contact is a single record representing one person. Each contact is uniquely identified by their email address — you cannot have two contacts with the same address in the same workspace. Every workspace on your account has its own contacts. Your plan's contact limit counts subscribed addresses across all of them: a person on two of your workspaces counts once, and contacts who unsubscribed, bounced or complained never count.

Contacts can belong to one or more lists, carry one or more tags, and can be grouped dynamically using segments. When you send a campaign, you choose which lists or segments receive it — SendBeam deduplicates automatically so no contact receives the same email twice.

Contact fields

Every contact record contains a set of standard fields plus any custom fields captured for that contact.

Standard fields

• Email address — required; must be unique within the workspace.
• First name — optional; used in merge tags like {"{{first_name}}"}.
• Last name — optional; used in the {"{{last_name}}"} merge tag.
• Status — managed automatically from delivery events and unsubscribes, and editable by hand; see Contact statuses below.
• Source — how the contact was added (manual, import, form, API).
• Created at — timestamp when the contact was first added.
• Subscribed / unsubscribed at — when the contact's status last changed.

Custom fields

Each contact can carry custom fields — free-form key/value pairs for data specific to your business, such as company name, plan or region. There is nothing to configure in advance: list the keys you want a signup form to capture, set them through the API when creating or updating a contact, or edit them as JSON on the contact's edit page. Custom fields appear on the contact profile, can be used in merge tags as {"{{custom_fields.key}}"}, and can be filtered on in segments.

Contact statuses

Every contact has a subscription status that determines whether they can receive marketing emails from you. SendBeam manages these statuses automatically based on contact actions, but you can also change them manually.

• Subscribed — the contact has opted in and will receive campaigns and automations sent to lists they belong to.
• Unsubscribed — the contact has opted out, either by clicking an unsubscribe link or through a manual update. SendBeam will never send marketing emails to unsubscribed contacts.
• Bounced — the contact's email address returned a hard bounce. SendBeam automatically marks these contacts to protect your sender reputation.
• Complained — the contact marked one of your emails as spam. Like bounced contacts, these are suppressed automatically.

What you can do with contacts

From the Contacts section of SendBeam you can perform all of the following actions:

• Add contacts one at a time using the manual add form.
• Import contacts in bulk by uploading a CSV file.
• Search contacts by name or email — the list updates as you type — and filter them by status, tag, list, source and the date they were added.
• Edit individual contact profiles to update fields, custom fields or subscription status.
• View a contact's campaign activity — which campaigns they were sent, and whether they opened or clicked.
• Apply bulk actions to many contacts at once (add or remove a tag, export, delete).
• Export contacts to a CSV file.

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