Contacts

Contacts are the people you send emails to. Every campaign, automation, and transactional email in Owlat starts with a contact record. Understanding how to manage your audience is essential for effective email marketing.

Contact information

Every contact has a set of standard fields:

• Email (required) — their email address, used for sending and as the unique identifier
• First Name and Last Name — used for personalization in your emails
• Language — their preferred language, used when sending translated emails
• Timezone — their local timezone, useful for time-aware sending
• Source — how they were added: a form submission (this also covers contacts added by hand in the dashboard, which are tagged form), the API (contacts created via the public API without an explicit source default to api), a CSV or integration import, a transactional send, or an inbound message (for example, an email or SMS reply that auto-creates a contact)

Beyond these, you can define your own custom fields through Contact Properties — things like company name, plan tier, or any other data point that matters for your campaigns.

Adding contacts

Create manually

1. Open Audience > Contacts.
2. Click Add Contact.
3. Fill in the email address and any additional fields.
4. Save the contact.

This is useful for adding individual contacts or VIP recipients.

Import from CSV

For bulk additions, CSV import is the fastest path:

1. Open Audience > Contacts.
2. Click Import.
3. Upload your CSV file.
4. Map each column to the corresponding contact field (including any custom properties).
5. Assign contacts to topics — you can either:
   • Global assignment — add all imported contacts to one or more topics
   • Column mapping — map a CSV column to topic membership, so each contact is added to the topic specified in their row
6. Review the import summary and confirm.

Import from integrations

Owlat can import contacts directly from third-party services:

• Mailchimp — import lists with automatic cursor pagination. Select which Mailchimp list to import from and map fields to Owlat contact fields.
• Stripe — import customers from your Stripe account.

During import you can choose how to handle duplicates:

• Skip — leave existing contacts unchanged
• Update — overwrite existing contact data with the imported values

Import progress is tracked in real time, and any errors (invalid emails, API failures) are reported at the end of the import.

To start an integration import, go to Audience > Contacts, click Import, and choose Integrations from the dropdown. (For a CSV import, choose CSV File from the same dropdown.)

Collect through forms

Set up public signup forms to capture contacts from your website. Form submissions automatically create contacts and can add them to a topic. See Forms for setup details.

Add through the API

Create and update contacts programmatically using the API. This is ideal for syncing contacts from your application or CRM. See the API documentation for details.

Viewing a contact

Click on any contact to open their detail page. The profile area shows all standard and custom property values and the topics the contact belongs to. Below that, the detail page is organized into six tabs:

• Activity — a chronological log of marketing interactions: emails received, opens, clicks, topic subscriptions, and property changes
• Timeline — the unified message history across every channel the contact has communicated on
• Knowledge — knowledge graph entries linked to this contact (see Knowledge Graph)
• Files — files associated with the contact (see Files)
• Identities — the contact's multi-channel identifiers, such as email addresses and phone numbers (see Audience Data)
• Relationships — links to other contacts in the relationship graph (see Audience Data)

The Activity tab is especially useful for understanding a contact's engagement history before reaching out or troubleshooting delivery issues.

Organizing contacts

Owlat gives you three complementary ways to organize your audience:

Most teams use all three together. For example, you might have a "Newsletter" topic for explicit subscribers, a "High Engagement" segment for contacts who opened emails recently, and a "Plan Tier" property to personalize content.

Subscription and compliance

A contact's eligibility to receive marketing emails depends on three things: whether they're a member of the targeted topic, their contact-level double opt-in (DOI) state, and whether they appear on the global blocklist.

• Topic membership is binary — a contact is either in a topic or they aren't. There is no per-topic "active/unsubscribed" flag. Unsubscribing simply removes the contact from that topic's membership; resubscribing adds them back.
• Double opt-in (DOI) is tracked per contact. For topics that require confirmation, only contacts whose DOI status is confirmed (or not_required) are eligible; contacts left pending are held back until they confirm. See Topics and Deliverability for how DOI is configured and enforced.
• Blocklisted contacts are excluded from all sends. A contact lands on the blocklist for one of three reasons: bounced, complained, or manual (added by hand by an admin).

Use the Deliverability tools and unsubscribe controls to maintain a healthy, compliant audience.

Next steps

• Contact Properties — define custom fields for your contacts
• Topics — organize contacts into explicit groups
• Segments — create dynamic, rule-based groups
• Forms — collect contacts from your website