End-user guides:: Managing contact lists – Emarsys

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.

Creating contact lists

To create contact lists, go to Contacts > Contact Lists, then click Create Contact List.

You can choose from the following options:

To save the contacts from a manual import as a contact list, select From Data Import..., click next to the specific import, then click Save Contact List.
To save the contacts from an auto-import as a contact list, select From Auto-imports...
If you would like to create a contact list using the Emarsys API, click the Emarsys API link to open the Emarsys API documentation.

Unused contact lists (i.e. which are not used in a segment or campaign) are deleted automatically for performance reasons. The period after which unused contact lists are deleted depends on your account settings. For more information, please contact Emarsys Support.

You can also save contact lists the following ways:

In the Segment Details page, click Display Contacts, then click Save Contact List.
When Emarsys displays the Search Results page, click Save Contact List. The Search Results page is displayed when you:
- search for contacts,
- click a linked response metric in one of the reporting screens.

Managing contact lists

On the Contact Lists page you can view all your contact lists and:

their names
their description
the date of creation
the number of contacts included
the number of contacts who have a valid opt-in

To arrange the columns, click their title.

Here you can:

Display the contacts in a list by clicking.
Rename a contact list and change its description by clicking.
Refresh a contact list by clicking. For example, you can refresh a list after deleting a contact.
Delete a contact list by clicking. 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 Contacts menu.

When you View the list, you have additional controls available:

Here you can:

save the contacts as another list (i.e. make a copy),
edit a contacts properties,
remove a contact from the list,
delete a contact from your database.

Managing the contacts in a contact list

You can also manage the contacts in a list by clicking the icon to display the contacts. You can now:

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.

To merge contact lists, proceed as follows:

1. Create a segment based on the first of the contact lists you want to merge.

2. 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: