Viewing and editing a contact

Manage your contacts from the Audience page. For everything else the page can do, see Finding your way around Audience.

Want the big picture on your audience?

Penpal can give you audience performance rollups in conversation, for example “how has subscriber growth looked over the last 30 days?” See how Penpal works.

Sorting your audience

Click any column header to sort the list by name, email, subscription status, date added, or tags. Click the same header again to reverse the sort order.

Sorting by tags groups contacts who share a tag, making it easier to review them in one pass. By default, the list shows your newest subscribers first.

Finding contacts

Use the Search by keyword field to locate a contact by name or email, and narrow results with filters before searching:

• Status: subscribed, unsubscribed, pending, and so on.
• Tags and Segments.
• Date added: focus on recent signups or review a specific cohort, for example to audit growth from a campaign or check a recent import.
• No tags: show only contacts with no tags applied, so you can find untagged contacts and organize them.

Viewing or editing a contact

1. Locate the contact and click their row to open their full profile.
2. From the profile’s actions menu, choose Edit profile.
3. Update their audience status or any other profile or custom field, then click Save.

To change their tags, use the Tags panel on the profile directly instead. See creating and applying tags. Tag changes apply as you make them, with no separate save step.

The same menu also lets an administrator export everything Letterhead holds on the contact or remove them. See Deleting contacts and handling data requests.

Activity log and engagement

Profile details sit on one side of the page and the activity log sits alongside them. It shows:

• Opens and clicks: every newsletter open and link click, which you can filter by Opens or Clicks, sort by Newest or Oldest, and search by newsletter or link.
• Bounces: hard and soft bounces, with the reason the mail server gave and the date. See Understanding bounces.
• Purchases: purchases made through a connected Stripe account, with the product name as well as the amount.
• IP addresses: the IP address Letterhead saw for each open and click, and the contact’s most recent IP address in their profile details. Automated opens and clicks from mailbox-provider prefetch and security scanners are left out, so the addresses reflect real activity.

Clicking a link entry takes you to the link the reader clicked; clicking a newsletter entry takes you to that newsletter’s metrics.

The profile’s engagement card totals the contact’s opens, clicks, promotion clicks (sponsored links and ads they’ve clicked), and hard and soft bounces. The profile also shows the interests Letterhead has inferred for the reader.

Activity is recorded from the moment the Audience Profile page launched, so earlier opens and clicks don’t appear, and it’s kept for up to 12 months per contact.

Suppressions

The Suppressions section lists every newsletter the contact can’t receive and why:

• Newsletter name: which publication the contact can’t receive.
• Reason: why they were suppressed, with the bounce details when a bounce caused it.
• Suppressed date: when the contact was removed from that newsletter.
• Undeliverable warning: if a hard bounce has made the address undeliverable everywhere, the profile shows a warning, and the address appears as a single “suppressed everywhere” entry rather than one entry per newsletter.

When an address hard-bounces, the contact is suppressed from every newsletter they were subscribed to, so the profile reflects the current state across all your publications. The list is also reconciled daily against the email provider’s own suppression records.

If a reader used Unsubscribe from everything on your email preferences page, the profile shows that they chose to leave everything your company sends, with the date. Nothing is wrong with the mailbox; the reader simply asked to stop. A new signup through one of your signup forms clears the notice. See Leaving everything in one step.

Re-subscribing a contact

Group and channel administrators can re-subscribe a contact:

1. Open the contact’s profile and choose Edit profile.
2. Change their status to Subscribed, then save.
3. Check the updated status in the Audience list.

What happens next depends on your double opt-in setting, which is on by default. With it on, the contact moves to Pending Confirmation and is subscribed again once they click the link in the confirmation email. With it off, the change takes effect straight away and no confirmation email is sent.

• People who unsubscribed themselves usually meant it. Re-subscribe someone only when you’re confident they want to hear from you.
• An import won’t re-subscribe them. A CSV import leaves a contact who unsubscribed, or was cleaned, as they are, even when the file marks them subscribed. Change their status here instead.
• You can send them a welcome letter, if you have one, at the same time.
• Cleaned addresses bounced repeatedly and are suppressed to protect your sender reputation, so they generally shouldn’t be re-subscribed. See Understanding bounces.

Audience statuses

Status	What it means	What you can do
Any status	All contacts regardless of subscription status.	Search or filter across the entire audience.
Cleaned	The email has bounced or failed delivery too many times.	Can’t be emailed; consider updating their address.
Disengaged	Hasn’t interacted (opened or clicked) in a while.	Avoid over-sending; use for re-engagement or pruning.
Not Subscribed	In your database but never opted into marketing messages.	Can’t send campaigns unless they explicitly subscribe.
Pending Re-engagement	Marked inactive and part of a re-engagement effort.	Good target for win-back campaigns.
Pending Confirmation	Signed up but hasn’t confirmed (double opt-in).	See Using double opt-in.
Subscribed	Actively opted in.	Safe to send newsletters to.
Unsubscribed	Opted out of future communications.	Don’t email unless they resubscribe.

Changing many contacts at once

You can tag contacts in bulk directly from the Audience list. On your company-wide Contacts, administrators can also delete contacts, change a subscription status, remove a tag or edit a custom field for a whole selection. See Finding your way around Audience.

Anyone who can view audience profiles can see a profile, which includes group and channel administrators. If you don’t see one, ask your administrator. If something on a profile looks wrong, contact support.