What are contact lists?

Contact lists are targeted subgroups of your database that contain contact information data that is gathered and compiled from your parent database.

Note: Time stamps in the Additional List Details section are updated to reflect the medium date format.

With contact lists, you can:

Create multiple contact lists per database.
Add and remove contacts in various ways.
Send emails to one or more contact lists by building queries.
Build subscription-management controls for opt-in, opt-out, and update web forms.
Report on contact list email results

About this feature

You can use a contact list to group (or tag) contacts. Although the contact list is associated with a parent database and consists of contacts within the parent database, the contact list is not updated when values in fields or behaviors for the contact change. Instead, contacts are added through various means.

Note: Contacts remain in your contact list until you manually remove them. For example, when Contact A is added to your contact list, the contact record remains there until you remove it. However, if a contact opts out of an email, the contact is removed from the parent database, but the contact record is still in your contact list.

To avoid confusion and sending emails to someone who opted out, be sure to use the subscription management option in the Web Forms Preferences section, which allows contacts to choose which emails to opt out of and which to continue receiving.

For more information, see the Web Forms article or contact Support.

Keep better tabs on what you're sending to contacts and their responses to your mailings. Previously, a contact might appear in multiple regular databases, with each instance tracked separately. Now, you can have a parent (or master) database with multiple contact lists associated with it. Every email is associated with the contact in the parent database, so every action a contact takes in response to the email is recorded in one place, allowing a more strategic approach to marketing.

Create a contact list to add contacts from the parent database. This is done for many reasons, such as newsletters, sales and promotions, bill payment. You can then use queries for special circumstances, such as sending a discount offer for last season's hot new sports bike to male contacts who receive your sports bike newsletter.

Is there a limit to the number of contact lists you can have in an org?

Having a large number of contact lists does affect performance, but there is no fixed number of lists that causes performance issues to occur. The best practice is to lay out a folder strategy that scales with contact lists if you are considering an approach that includes hundreds to thousands of lists over time.