Contact statuses explained

This article explains how we define each of our four contact statuses and will show you how to filter your contacts by their status.

Active Contact

An active contact is a contact who:

• Is not on a list
• Or a contact who is on at least one list and has confirmed their subscription (if you are using opt-in confirmation) and has not unsubscribed or bounced.

An active contact can opt in through a form, can be added by you manually, through an integration, through the API, etc. For more information on how to add contacts, see the help article on that topic.

Active contacts count toward your total contacts (the number that is used to determine your billing plan). A contact will no longer be counted as “Active” if your campaigns bounce or they unsubscribe from your lists. 

Unconfirmed

A contact is labeled as unconfirmed if they submit a form that includes an opt-in confirmation email (also known as double opt-in), but have not yet clicked the confirmation link.

Unconfirmed contacts will not be sent campaign emails, or advance through an automation until they have been moved to “Active” either by clicking the confirmation link or being manually added to a list by an admin user. Note that manually adding unconfirmed contacts to lists violates our terms of use and may upset your contacts resulting in spam complaints. 

Unsubscribed

A contact is labeled as unsubscribed when they have either manually unsubscribed by clicking an unsubscribe link in an email campaign you've sent, or if they have been manually removed from a list by you or an “Unsubscribe” action in an automation.

Contacts that have been unsubscribed from all lists are not counted towards your account's contact limit. If they are subscribed to at least one list, they will be counted to your contact total. 

Bounced

A contact is labeled as bounced when an email campaign that is sent to them is rejected by their receiving email server. These rejection notices indicate the email address is either invalid or inaccessible.

There are hard bounces and soft bounces:

A hard bounce means that the message was returned with the error that it was permanently rejected. If we receive a a hard bounce, the contact is immediately given the status of “Bounced” and we will no longer send to them.

A soft bounce means that the email address may be only temporarily unavailable. In the case of a soft bounce, we will try to send a message two more times. If it bounces three times total, we will give it the status of “Bounced” and we will no longer send campaigns or emails sent within automation to that contact. 

To filter your contacts by status:

Navigate to the Contact Overview by clicking “Contacts” in the top menu.

You'll see a row of filters above your list of contacts. Click “Any” next to “Status” to display a menu of contact statuses.

Click the status you are interested in filtering by to display those contacts.

Note that you can combine filters to further narrow your contact list. For instance, you could filter first by the list and then by the contact status to find contacts on that list that are unconfirmed or unsubscribed.