Delete a contact from your account

Delete an individual contact or a group of contacts from your account

Important: You worked hard to gather a list of contacts who gave you permission to send them email or SMS messages. With a little TLC, you can earn their attention back, so before you delete your disengaged contacts, check out ways to reengage them!

While managing your contacts and cleaning up your lists, you may need to delete a contact or a group of contacts from your account. When you delete contacts from your account, the action can't be undone; however, the contacts can rejoin your list at any time through a sign-up form.

• Saving information before deleting contacts
• Deleting a contact or multiple contacts
• Temporarily removing a contact

Saving information before deleting contacts

Most contact deletions are permanent, but contacts can be re-added to an account at any time, either manually by you or when a contact re-joins your list through a sign-up form. When a contact is re-added to your account, not all of their information is retained. We recommend exporting the information before deleting contacts to prevent permanent loss.

Information that's retained:

• The email status of the contact (can be exported)
• Contact information and custom fields (can be exported)
• Notes within the contact record (can be exported)
• Open and click reporting information within your email reporting (can be exported)

Information that's lost:

• List assignments (can be exported)
• Tag assignments (can be exported)
• Insights for the past 30 days within the contact record (export unavailable, but can be saved by taking a screenshot)
• Activity within the contact record (export unavailable, but can be saved by taking a screenshot)

Did you know? Contacts who have been deleted are indicated by a strike-through in your email reporting: leigh.grammer@gmail.com, so you can still see the opens and clicks attributed to them, but you aren't able to view or edit their contact record.

Deleting a contact or multiple contacts

It only takes a couple of clicks to remove an unwanted contact from your account. Depending on the number of contacts you're deleting, it may take a few minutes for the change to be reflected in your account.

1. From the Contacts page, search for the contacts you want to delete. You can also filter your contacts by their email or SMS status to help narrow your search.
2. Use the checkboxes to select the contacts you want to delete.
3. Click Actions > Delete.
   
   
   
   
4. Click the Delete button to confirm the action.
   
   
   
   

Temporarily removing a contact

If you're looking to temporarily archive or remove a contact from your list(s) but think you might need that contact data again in the future, consider placing the contact in a "Temporary hold" status. Placing a contact on a temporary hold prevents you from sending to them until you remove the hold. The temporary hold can be added or removed from an individual contact by editing their contact record and choosing the "Temporary hold" option from the Email status drop-down in the Campaign channels section.

A temporary hold can't be performed in bulk for a group of contacts.

Did you know? Contacts can also end up with a temporary hold if they were created using a sign-up form that lacks a method to verify the sign-up is indeed from a human, such as CAPTCHA, and you experience a fraudulent sign-up attack. These contacts should be left alone so that if another fraudulent attack is made with the same group of email addresses, they aren't added to your account again.

Questions?