Contact lists can be used as an alternative to segments when selecting the recipient source for campaigns or the source for an export. Whereas segments are constantly refreshed every time they are used, contact lists are static and do not change.
Contents:
Creating contact lists
Whenever Emarsys displays the Search Results page, you have the option to Save Contact List.
This page is displayed when you search for contacts, when you click on a linked response metric in one of the reporting screens, or when you click Display Contacts in the Segment Details page.
You can also choose to save the contacts in an import as a contact list, or create a list using the Emarsys API.
These three last options are also accessible via the Create Contact List button on the Contact Lists page, which links straight through to the manual or auto-import pages, or opens the documentation for the Emarsys API.
Managing contact lists
On the Contact Lists page you can view all your contact lists. You see their names, their description, the date of creation, the number of contacts included and how many of these have a valid opt-in. To arrange the columns, click their title.
You can manage the contact lists via the icons to the right.
- View list – This displays the contacts in the list.
- Rename the list – You can change the name and description only.
- Refresh the list – For example after you have deleted a contact.
- Delete the list – This deletes the list but not the contacts in it. To delete a list and all the contacts in it, you need to use the Delete Contacts in the Admin menu feature.
When you View the list, you have additional controls available:
Here you can save them as another list (i.e. make a copy), as well as:
- edit a contact’s properties.
- remove a contact from the list.
- delete a contact from your database.
Managing the contacts in a contact list
- Edit a contact’s properties.
- Remove a contact from the contact list.
- Delete a contact from your database.
Adding contacts to contact lists
The only way that you can add contacts to an existing contact list is via the API endpoint Adding contacts to a contact list.
If you do not use the Emarsys API, your only option is to export a contact list, add the new contacts externally and then re-import it, selecting the function Save contact list as.
Merging contact lists
You cannot merge contact lists directly, but you can combine two lists into a new list by creating a segment from each list, combining those and saving the result as a new list. Proceed as follows:
- Create a segment based on the first of the contact lists you want to merge.
- Define a pair of mutually exclusive contact criteria that will ensure every contact in the list is in the segment, for example email is empty OR email is not empty, as shown below:
- Repeat this for the second contact list.
- In the Combined Segments page, create a new segment based on both of these (making sure to use the OR operator again):
- Save this new segment and click Display Contacts.
You can now save the displayed contacts as a new contact list, as described at the start of this article.