Contacts

A contact is one person in your workspace, identified by their email address. Contacts hold the names and custom field values you use to personalize campaigns, and they join audiences, which are the lists campaigns send to. This page explains how the pieces fit together and what you can do with contacts in the dashboard and the API.

Contacts, audiences and subscribers

Emailit keeps people and lists apart. A person exists once as a contact, and each list they’re on is a separate subscriber record with its own opt-in state.

Workspace
├── Contacts ────────────── one per email address
│   ├── email, first_name, last_name, custom_fields
│   └── marketing status (unsubscribed: true | false)
└── Audiences ───────────── named lists, for example "Newsletter"
    └── Subscribers ─────── one per contact on the list
        └── subscribed: true | false

In practice:

• One contact can be a subscriber of many audiences, with a separate Subscribed flag in each.
• Adding someone to an audience by email creates the contact first if it doesn’t exist yet.
• Names and custom fields live on the contact. Editing them from an audience changes the contact, so the change shows everywhere.

Who receives a campaign

A campaign goes to every contact that meets all three conditions:

1. The contact is a subscriber of at least one of the campaign’s audiences, with Subscribed on.
2. The contact’s marketing status is Subscribed.
3. The address isn’t on your suppression list.

A contact in several of the selected audiences gets one copy. See Create a campaign for the full rules.

Marketing status

Every contact also has a workspace-wide Marketing status: Subscribed or Unsubscribed (the unsubscribed field in the API). It’s a global opt-out that sits above the per-audience flag.

Marketing status and audience subscriptions control campaigns only. They don’t block emails you send with the API or SMTP, or emails sent by automations. To stop all mail to an address, add it to your suppressions. Unsubscribes covers every opt-out path.

The Contacts list

Open Email Marketing›Contacts to see every contact in the workspace, newest first.

• Columns. Email is always shown. Turn First name, Last name, Audiences, Created and Updated on or off under Display options > Edit columns, or select Show full name to merge the names into one Name column. In the Audiences column, each audience badge is green while the contact is subscribed to it and red after they unsubscribe.
• Search matches email, first name and last name.
• Filter by Email, Name, First name, Last name, Unsubscribed, Created, Updated, Audiences or Audience, and by any custom field. With two or more filters, choose whether to match all of them or any of them.
• Sort by selecting a column header.
• Import and Export move contacts in and out as files. See Import and export contacts.

Select a row to open the contact. The row menu has Edit and Delete.

Add a contact

Select Add contact and enter the Email, and optionally First name, Last name and Audiences. Select Show custom fields to fill in custom field values. An email address can only exist once per workspace, so adding an existing address fails.

To change a contact later, select Edit. You can change the names and custom fields. The email address can’t be changed in the dashboard. Use the email field of Update a contact instead.

Bulk actions

Select contacts with the checkboxes (the header checkbox selects the whole page), then open Actions. Each action applies to up to 100 contacts at a time.

The contact page

The contact page shows everything Emailit knows about one person. Use Edit and Delete at the top.

Use the API

The Contacts API covers everything the list and profile do, except importing files:

• Create, retrieve, update, list and delete contacts. Wherever an ID is expected, you can pass the contact’s email address instead of its con_ ID.
• Pass audiences (an array of aud_ IDs) when you create a contact to subscribe it right away. On update, audiences replaces the contact’s memberships.
• Run a bulk action on up to 100 contacts, and export up to 10,000 as CSV or XLSX.

curl https://api.emailit.com/v2/contacts \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $EMAILIT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "email": "ada@example.com",
    "first_name": "Ada",
    "last_name": "Lovelace",
    "custom_fields": { "company": "Acme", "plan": "pro" },
    "audiences": ["aud_2kq8Vt4xLm7Rz"]
  }'

Creating a contact with an email that already exists returns 409 with the existing contact in existing. The Contacts API needs an API key with Full Access.

Contact changes produce contact.created, contact.updated and contact.deleted events, and membership changes produce subscriber.* events, which you can receive with webhooks.

Next steps