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A campaign sends to lists. A list is a group of contacts, and a contact is one person in your account, found by email address. This page explains how contacts come in, what the custom fields are for, how lists work and what the different statuses mean.

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Contacts

A contact exists once in your account, whatever the number of lists it is on. The email address is the key: AhaSend trims it and lowercases it, so Ann@Example.com and ann@example.com are the same contact. Contacts come in three ways:
  • CSV import on the Contacts page, on a list, or while you create a new list. A file can be up to 100 MB. See importing a CSV.
  • By hand, one contact at a time, on the Contacts page. To put an existing contact on a list, use Add to List on the contact’s page.
  • From your own app or website, through the Management API: one contact per request, or up to 1,000 per request with Batch Upsert Contacts.
Every contact has its own page with its fields, the lists it is on, its opens and clicks, and every campaign it received.

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Importing a CSV

The import matches the columns of your file to the contact fields by their header: email, first_name, last_name, status and the name or key of each of your custom fields. Columns that match no field are ignored. There is no preview: the file is imported when you upload it. Rules that apply to every import:
  • A contact that already exists is updated, not duplicated.
  • An empty cell never wipes a value you already have.
  • A contact that unsubscribed from everything stays unsubscribed. A contact that unsubscribed from a list is not put back on that list by a new import.
  • The address column can be named email or Email Address, so a Mailchimp export imports as it is. From Mailchimp, import only the subscribed contacts file: the unsubscribed and cleaned files have no status column, so their contacts would come in as subscribed.
  • Save the file as UTF-8. A file saved in another encoding imports names with accents or non-Latin letters garbled; export it again as CSV UTF-8.
Import into a list when the file is a list, for example your newsletter subscribers. Import on the Contacts page when you only want the contacts in your account, and add them to lists later.

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Contact Status

You set the status when you add a contact, or with a status column in a CSV import of new contacts. To change the status of an existing contact, use Update Contact. Next to the status, a contact can be unsubscribed from everything. That is the account-wide opt-out: campaigns skip the contact on every list, and its memberships stay as they are. Email validation adds a third signal: a contact whose address was found invalid is left out of campaigns.

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Custom Fields

Add the fields your campaigns need, such as company, plan, city, VIP or customer since, under Marketing > Contact fields. A field has a name, a key and a type: text, number, yes/no, date or date/time. The type is fixed when you create the field, so a number stays a number. Renaming a field changes only its name, not its key, so it does not break the campaigns, searches or API calls that use it. Custom fields are used in two places:
  • Filtering: find the contacts that match, with advanced search.
  • Personalization: write {{ first_name }} or the key of any field of your own in the email, and each recipient sees their own value. Give a default for contacts where the field is empty. See personalization.
Through the API, custom fields are the attributes of a contact. The API accepts only fields that you defined in the dashboard, with a value of the right type. See attributes.

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Lists

A list is a static group of contacts and the unit a campaign targets. A campaign sends to one or more lists; through the API, up to 50. List names do not have to be unique, so give lists names that tell them apart. The Lists page shows two numbers for each list: how many contacts are on it, and how many a campaign would reach. The second number counts a contact when its membership is confirmed, the contact is enabled, it has not unsubscribed from everything, and email validation did not find its address invalid. The API returns the same number as contact_count.

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List Status

Each contact on a list has its own status on that list, separate from the contact status above: A list page can therefore show a contact as Confirmed on the list and Blocked as a contact at the same time. The two columns answer different questions: is the contact subscribed to this list, and can AhaSend send to this contact at all. A campaign reaches the contact only when both answers are yes.

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Unsubscribe, Remove or Delete

The dashboard has no button to unsubscribe a contact; recipients unsubscribe themselves with the link in a campaign. To stop marketing email to a contact yourself, unsubscribe it through the API rather than removing it. Contacts and suppressions are separate records. A suppression you add by hand, or one that a bounce of your transactional mail creates, does not change any contact or list status.

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Advanced Search and Saved Lists

On a list page, the search box finds contacts by email, first name or last name, and advanced search filters on any field, with AND and OR rules and groups, relative dates such as “7 days ago”, and checks for empty fields. The page shows how many contacts match out of the total. To send to just those contacts, click Save as new list and the matching contacts are copied to a new list; this works for a plain search as well as for an advanced search. The new list is a copy, made when you save it. The contacts are copied in the background, and the new list’s page shows when the copy is done. Contacts that match later are not added, and every contact keeps its status: a contact who unsubscribed stays unsubscribed on the new list too. The Send Campaign button on a list page starts a campaign for the whole list, also when a search narrows what you see. To send to the matching contacts only, save them as a new list first.

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Export

Export CSV on the Contacts page exports all contacts of your account. The file has the standard fields, the status and your custom fields, in the order you set under Marketing > Contact fields.