How Recipient Lists Work

From the Emailing > Lists page, you can create and manage your recipient lists for sending email campaigns. Lists make it easier to target the right audience for a given communication. Once created, a list can be reused for other campaigns.

There are two types of recipient lists, also called mailing lists:

If you archive a contact from your Community, they will be removed from all Community-linked lists. However, if you had also added them to a list not linked to your Community (see below), they will remain on that list.

Lists not linked to the Community

Mailing lists not linked to your Community are created by manually adding email addresses (e.g., importing email addresses from an Excel file).

These lists can also include emails collected through the newsletter sign-up widget displayed on your website. For more information on setting up the newsletter, see this article.

These lists let you keep your database count optimized (which determines your subscription cost). You can add contacts to a list not linked to the Community without importing them into your Contacts list.

To learn how to create a list not linked to the Community, see our article: Create, edit, or delete an email campaign recipient list

Recipient statuses

The 4 possible statuses

Recipients on a list are sorted into 4 categories:

• Recipients with an apparently valid email address who have not unsubscribed;

  • Note: if multiple people share the same email address, they will only receive a campaign email once. The number of unique valid email addresses is shown on this tab.

• Unsubscribed: either manually (by clicking an unsubscribe link at the bottom of an email) or automatically following a hard bounce;
• People with no email address — from this list, you can easily add one;
• People whose email addresses have been identified as invalid, and who will therefore not receive any emails.

Only people with recipient status will receive your email campaigns.

Contacts added to a list not linked to the Community must have an email address. As a result, only 3 categories apply: recipients, unsubscribed, and emails identified as invalid.

Managing unsubscribes and re-subscribing a recipient

When a recipient unsubscribes, they are unsubscribed from all lists they belonged to. This also applies to advanced group lists that are not independent from the main platform.

To find unsubscribed people, go to Communication > Emailing → Lists, click on the list you're interested in, then select "Unsubscribed".

If it was a mistake, you can re-subscribe that person.

Never re-subscribe someone without their explicit request — doing so will damage your sender reputation and hurt your deliverability.

Re-subscribing will change their status from unsubscribed to recipient. Since unsubscribes and re-subscribes apply globally, this status change affects all lists.

Learn more:

• Offer newsletter sign-up from the blog or website
• Create, edit, or delete an email campaign recipient list