Contacts

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Overview

Contacts in Notifuse are comprehensive customer profiles that store subscriber information, preferences, and engagement data. They support flexible data storage through predefined fields and can be associated with multiple mailing lists.

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Contact Fields

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Contact Management

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Contact Identity and Upsert Behavior

The email address is the unique identifier of a contact: it is the primary key in the database, and every upsert operation (contacts.upsert, contacts.import, and the contact embedded in transactional.send) matches contacts by email address only:

• New emails: Automatically creates a new contact
• Existing emails: Updates the existing contact with provided fields
• Null values: Setting any field to null removes that value from the contact

external_id is an optional reference to the contact in your own system (for example, your application’s user ID). It is stored, searchable, and returned by the API, but it is not a unique key:

• It is never used to match contacts during upserts.
• Notifuse does not prevent several contacts from sharing the same external_id.
• If several contacts share the same external_id, contacts.getByExternalID returns only one of them (which one is not defined).

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Changing a Contact’s Email Address

Because the email address is the contact’s identity, upserting the same external_id with a new email address creates a second contact — it does not update the email of the existing one. When a user changes their email address in your system:

1. Fetch the old contact with contacts.getByEmail to retrieve its profile and its list subscriptions with their statuses.
2. Upsert a contact with the new email address, sending the full profile (upserts merge fields, so include every field you want to keep, such as external_id, names, and custom fields).
3. Re-create the list subscriptions on the new contact with lists.subscribe.
4. Delete the contact with the old email address using contacts.delete.

Also keep in mind:

• Message history and segment memberships are keyed to the email address. They stay attached to the old email address and are not transferred to the new contact.
• Active automations: deleting the old contact drops it from any automation it is currently progressing through; the new contact does not resume its position.

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Deleting a Contact

Deleting a contact with contacts.delete also deletes its list subscriptions, unsubscribed, bounced and complained statuses included, so Notifuse no longer remembers that the address opted out. A later import, upsert with subscribe_to_lists or lists.subscribe adds the address back as a new, subscribed contact. To keep honouring an opt-out, set the contact’s list status to unsubscribed instead of deleting it. An unsubscribe link in an email sent before the deletion still answers successfully, but stores nothing about the address.

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List Subscriptions

• Contacts can subscribe to one or multiple mailing lists
• Subscription status is managed per list
• List memberships are tracked through the contact_lists relationship

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Contact Segmentation Engine

Notifuse includes a powerful real-time contact segmentation engine that allows you to create dynamic audience segments based on contact properties and engagement behavior. Segments automatically update as contact data changes, ensuring your targeting remains accurate and current.

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Building Segments

Segments are built using a flexible condition system that supports:

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Contact Property Conditions

Filter contacts based on their profile data using standard comparison operators:

• Numerical fields: Custom number fields
• Date fields: Custom datetime fields
• String fields: first_name, last_name, country, custom string fields
• Comparison operators: greater than, less than, equal to, not equal to, contains, etc.

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Goal-Based Conditions

Build RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) segments using Custom Events & Goals:

• Monetary: Total spend, average order value
• Frequency: Purchase count, event count
• Recency: Activity within a timeframe

Example segments: VIP customers (spent $1000+), repeat buyers (3+ orders), at-risk customers (no purchase in 90 days).

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Activity-Based Conditions

Target contacts based on their engagement behavior with your emails and your website:

• New message: Contact received an email
• Open email: Contact opened an email
• Click email: Contact clicked a link in an email
• Bounce email: Email bounced for this contact
• Complain email: Contact marked an email as spam
• Unsubscribe from list: Contact unsubscribed from a mailing list
• View web page: Contact viewed a page on your website, filterable by path, time on page and scroll depth
• Visit website: Contact made a visit, filterable by entry and exit page, pages viewed, duration, channel, campaign, device and country

The two website conditions require Web Analytics and a visitor who has been identified. Activity conditions support additional parameters:

• Frequency: Number of times the activity occurred
• Timeframe: When the activity happened (e.g., in the last 30 days)

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Condition Logic

Segments support both AND/OR logic for combining multiple conditions:

• ALL conditions: Contact must match every condition (AND logic)
• ANY conditions: Contact needs to match at least one condition (OR logic)

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Use Cases

Common segmentation scenarios include:

• VIP Customers: High spenders with multiple purchases (use goal-based conditions)
• Engagement Recovery: Re-engage inactive subscribers who haven’t opened emails in 90 days
• At-Risk Customers: Previously active buyers with no recent purchases
• Geographic Targeting: Send region-specific campaigns based on country or state
• Behavioral Triggers: Target users who clicked specific product links

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Technical Details

The segmentation engine leverages contact timeline data introduced in version 7.0, which tracks all contact interactions including messages, webhook events, and profile mutations. Activity events include granular kind field types (e.g., email.opened, email.clicked, web.pageview) enabling precise behavioral targeting. All timestamps are stored in UTC timezone and can be evaluated in user-specified timezones for date-based conditions.

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Segment Permissions

Segments have their own Segments permission: read lists segments and opens one, write creates, edits, deletes and rebuilds them, and runs, resets or deletes their background build tasks. Previewing a segment while you build it, and listing the contacts a segment currently matches, additionally require the Contacts read permission — both answer questions about your contacts rather than about the segment definition. A member holding Segments read alone can work with segment definitions, but not see who is in them. Preview accepts any definition sent to it, not just a saved segment. Someone holding Segments read together with Contacts read can therefore ask counting questions about any contact attribute, list membership, custom event or timeline entry, one count at a time.

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Importing Contacts from CSV

Notifuse provides a powerful CSV import feature that streamlines the process of adding multiple contacts to your workspace. The import system is designed to be intuitive and robust, handling large datasets efficiently.

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Auto-Detection and Field Mapping

The CSV importer automatically detects and suggests field mappings based on your CSV column headers. Common column names like “email”, “first_name”, “last_name”, and “phone” are automatically matched to their corresponding contact fields. For custom or non-standard column names, you can manually map each CSV column to the appropriate contact field through an intuitive interface.

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Mailing List Assignment

During the import process, you can select one or multiple mailing lists to add your contacts to. This allows you to immediately segment your imported contacts and ensures they’re properly organized within your workspace. All imported contacts will be automatically subscribed to the selected lists upon successful import.

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Progress Tracking and Recovery

The import process includes automatic progress saving, which means if your import is interrupted due to network issues or browser closure, you can resume from where you left off. This is particularly valuable when importing large CSV files with thousands of contacts, ensuring no data is lost during the process.

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Import Permissions

Importing needs the Contacts write permission. Selecting one or more mailing lists during the import needs Lists write as well. Bear in mind what an import does: every field a row carries overwrites the stored value on the matching contact. A single import can rewrite your whole contact database, so treat Contacts write as that level of access rather than as “can add contacts”.

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Permissions

Contact data answers to the Contacts permission:

• Read covers contact records and their full profiles, the contact timeline, and the custom events recorded against contacts. It is also required — alongside the matching Lists or Segments grant — to enumerate the addresses inside a list or a segment, and to set cc or bcc on a transactional send.
• Write covers creating and updating contacts, deleting them, bulk-overwriting them through a CSV or API import, and recording custom events. Changing a contact’s subscription status on a list needs Lists write as well.

Write is not “can add contacts”: it deletes permanently, and it overwrites in bulk. Three grants reach contact data without Contacts write, which is worth knowing before you hand any of them out:

• Lists write on its own creates or overwrites a complete contact record. Subscribing an address through /api/lists.subscribe writes every field the request carries, and can subscribe someone to a list that is not public.
• Automations write sends the complete contact record to any URL a webhook node names, and nothing checks permissions while an automation runs.
• Transactional write creates the recipient contact as part of sending. Without Contacts write, only the email address is stored and an existing contact is never modified — see Transactional API.

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Key Features

• Flexible Schema: Predefined fields cover most use cases while custom fields provide extensibility
• Automatic Deduplication: Email-based upserts prevent duplicate contacts for the same email address
• Multi-List Support: Single contact can belong to multiple mailing lists
• Data Removal: Explicit null handling for field cleanup