Contacts and lists

A contact is one person you can email. A list is a group of contacts you pick by hand, and it is what a campaign sends to. Under Contacts, Contact fields and Lists you see who is in your audience, store your own details on each person, and decide who belongs to which group.

What contacts are

Wakio's dashboard has no button to add, edit or delete a contact. People arrive in one of three ways: your developer adds them through the API, you bring them in with an import, or they sign up through a subscribe form. After that, you read and organize them here.

Every contact has one of 4 statuses:

When your developer adds an address that is already on your suppressed list, the new contact starts out Unreachable or Unsubscribed, to match the reason it was suppressed. Add a contact lists which reason gives which.

Someone who unsubscribed becomes active again by confirming a subscribe form themselves, unless they reported one of your emails as spam.

An email address appears once per account, whatever its capitalization.

Contacts

1. Whether you can mail them. Only Active contacts receive campaigns.
2. How they consented, such as Double opt in. It stays blank when no consent was recorded.
3. The lists they are in, written as a sentence.

Newest contacts come first, 50 to a page, with an Older button for the next page. Search matches part of an email address and nothing else, so searching for a person's name finds no one.

1. Type any part of an email address.
2. Narrow to the people in one list. The menu appears once you have a list.
3. Show one status at a time. Your search and list stay applied.
4. Adds every active contact the filters match to the list you choose, not only the ones on this page.

Add to list works on the whole set the filters match, so the button states how many contacts that is before you press it. It adds active contacts only. If the filter also matched people who are not active, Wakio adds the active ones and tells you how many it left out, because a list is what a campaign sends to.

If a live flow, an automated series of emails, starts when someone joins that list, Wakio asks you to confirm first. It tells you how many people will join and which flows that starts. If your account's sending is still warming up, it also says how many of them can enter the flow now. Everyone still joins the list.

1. Adds everyone to the list and starts the flow for them. Add without enrolling adds them to the list only.

A contact's page

Choose an email address in the table to open that contact.

1. Your contact fields and what this person has stored in each. A field with nothing stored reads None.
2. The consent record: the basis, the date, the source and the network address it was recorded from.
3. The lists this contact is in. Owners and admins use these buttons to add or remove them.

The page has five sections:

• Fields lists every field you have declared and the value stored for this contact.
• Consent lists each consent record.
• Recent deliveries shows the last 10 emails sent to this contact, each linking to its delivery.
• Lists shows which lists the contact is in.
• Flows shows each flow they are in, where they are in it, and whether it is running.

A consent record names its basis, which is how you came to be allowed to email this person:

• Double opt in means they confirmed, either by clicking a link in a confirmation email or because the export you imported carried a confirmation time.
• Single opt in means they signed up but never confirmed, and the export carried only a signup time.
• Controller assertion means the basis is your word that you have consent: an import row that carried no opt-in time, or a contact your developer added through the API saying they agreed. Wakio records your word, not proof of it.

A record can also show where it came from, such as an import or the API, the network address they signed up from and the version of the consent wording they saw. A contact with no consent record, such as one added through the API without saying they agreed, says so on its page.

If the address is on your suppression list, a Suppressed note sits above everything else and gives the reason. Depending on the reason, either nothing is sent to the address, or campaigns and flows skip it while a receipt or password reset still reaches it. Choose See suppressed addresses for the full list.

Contact fields

A field is a column you can store on every contact and use in a message, such as a plan name, a signup date or a city. Under Contact fields, owners and admins declare a new field and everyone can see the list.

1. The name you and your team see. It can be up to 120 characters.
2. How the value is stored, which sets what a value may look like.
3. The key, which is what a message refers to. Wakio builds it from the name.
4. Archive retires the field. Values already stored are kept.

Each field has a type, and a value has to look right for it:

The key comes from the name: Wakio lowercases it and swaps spaces and punctuation for underscores, so "Joined on" becomes joined_on. A name has to begin with a letter, which means "2026 plan" is refused, and a few keys are reserved for Wakio's own use, such as postal_address and the ones tracking links need. Once a field holds a value its key cannot change, and there is no edit form, so choose the name carefully. If you got it wrong, archive the field and declare a new one.

Archiving keeps every value already stored, but the field stops accepting new values and disappears from contact pages and from the import mapping. It stays in the table, dimmed and marked Archived.

Active fields become merge tags, placeholders that Wakio fills in with each person's own value when it sends. A field with the key plan is available in a campaign next to the built-in first name and email tags.

Lists

Under Lists, owners and admins create a list with a name, up to 120 characters, and an optional description. The table shows each list with its member count, and the count links to Contacts filtered to that list. There is no separate page for a list.

• You choose who is in a list, with two exceptions. You add people from a contact's page, in bulk from Contacts, or through an import that lands in a list. Someone who confirms a subscribe form joins its list, and if they had unsubscribed, confirming takes them out of every other list. An import takes a contact out of its list when it resolves them to any status other than active.
• Unsubscribing is account wide. Someone who opts out stops hearing from you whichever lists they are in.
• Campaigns reach active members only. Someone on the list who is unsubscribed, unreachable or suppressed is skipped.
• Removing a list keeps the contacts. Only the grouping goes. Imports and campaigns that used the list are kept too.

Wakio refuses to remove a list in two cases, and says which one:

• A subscribe form points at it. Delete that form first, on Subscribe forms.
• A flow starts on it. Open that flow's Flow settings and point it at a different list or a date field first. Pausing or archiving the flow does not free the list.

Who can do what

Every role sees contacts, fields and lists. Adding a field, archiving one, creating or removing a list, and changing who is in a list are for owners and admins. A member sees the lists a contact is in as plain text, with a note that an admin can change them, and does not see the Add to list controls.

Good to know

• The two ways to add differ. The Add to button on one contact's page adds that person whatever their status. Add to list on the Contacts table adds active contacts only. Either way, a campaign reaches only the active ones.
• Joining a list starts a flow in only two cases. Someone confirms a subscribe form, or you choose Add and enroll on the confirmation. The Add to button on a contact's page and an import add people to the list without starting anything. Turning a flow on does not pull in the people already in the list.

Related

• Add a contact, for your developer adding people through the API.
• Imports, for bringing a list in from another tool.
• Subscribe forms, for people signing themselves up.
• Campaigns, for sending to a list.