Your First Contact

Navigate to Contacts

Contacts are the foundation of everything in SendBeam. Every email address you send to must exist as a contact in your workspace. SendBeam stores each contact's email address, name, status, tags, and any custom fields captured for them.

To reach the Contacts section, click Contacts in the left navigation bar. You will land on the contacts list view, which shows all contacts in the workspace. If you have just set up your workspace, this list will be empty.

Add a contact manually

For adding one or a small number of contacts, the manual form is the quickest option:

1. On the Contacts page, click the Add Contact button in the top-right corner.
2. Enter the contact's Email address. This is the only required field (up to 254 characters).
3. Optionally enter a First name and Last name (up to 100 characters each). These are used in merge tags so you can personalise campaigns with {{first_name}}.
4. Optionally choose a Source (Manual, Import, API or Form) to record where the contact came from.
5. Click Add Contact. The contact is created immediately with the status Subscribed and will appear in your contacts list.

Understanding contact status

Every contact in SendBeam has a status that controls whether they receive emails. Setting the correct status is important for compliance with anti-spam regulations such as CAN-SPAM and GDPR.

• Subscribed — The contact has opted in and will receive campaigns and automations. This is the status to use when you have explicit permission to email someone.
• Unsubscribed — The contact has opted out of marketing emails. SendBeam will not send campaigns or automations to contacts with this status. Unsubscribes are set automatically when a contact clicks the unsubscribe link in an email.
• Bounced — A previous email to this address hard-bounced. SendBeam marks contacts as bounced automatically from delivery events and will not attempt to send to them again.
• Complained — The contact marked a message as spam. Like bounced contacts, complained contacts are excluded from future sends automatically.

Double opt-in is tracked per list rather than as a status: a contact added to a double opt-in list stays Subscribed but is not mailed by campaigns sent to that list until they click the confirmation email. On the Free plan every campaign, whatever its audience, only reaches contacts who have confirmed a subscription.

An address that unsubscribes, bounces, complains or is deleted goes on the workspace's suppression list. The API refuses to create it again, and a CSV import brings it in as Unsubscribed. Only the person can bring themselves back, by subscribing again through one of your signup forms.

Import contacts via CSV

If you are migrating from another platform or have a spreadsheet of subscribers, the CSV import tool lets you add hundreds or thousands of contacts in one go.

To import contacts:

• On the Contacts page, click the Import button next to Add Contact.
• Download the example file to see the expected column format.
• Your CSV must include an email column. The other supported columns are first_name and last_name.
• Drop your prepared CSV file (up to 5 MB) onto the upload area and click Import.
• SendBeam will process the file and report how many contacts were imported, how many duplicates were skipped and how many rows were invalid.

For a full walkthrough of the import tool, including how duplicates and plan limits are handled, see the CSV Import guide.