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:

• Linked to your Community: groups created in Community > Groups,
• Not linked to your Community: created manually or through newsletter sign-up.

Community-linked lists

These are based on groups created from the Community > Groups page:

• A static group feeds a list based on members as they are added or removed;
• A dynamic group generates a list automatically updated based on a criterion.

On the Emails > Lists page, you will find one list per group (static, dynamic, and advanced groups) containing all members of that group.

You can add contacts to a list not linked to the Community without importing them into the Contacts list.

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

Recipient statuses

The 4 possible statuses

Recipients in a list are sorted into 4 categories:

• recipients with a presumably valid email address who have not unsubscribed;

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

• unsubscribed contacts: 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 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. So only 3 categories exist: 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 of the main platform.

To find unsubscribed contacts, go to Communication > Emails > Lists, click the list you want, then select "Unsubscribed."

If it was a mistake, you can re-subscribe a person by clicking Re-subscribe.

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, the status applies across all lists.

Go further:

• Offer newsletter sign-up from your blog or website
• Create, edit, or delete a recipient list for email campaigns