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: manually, via CSV import, through a form, or through the API

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 mailing lists — you can either:
   • Global assignment — add all imported contacts to one or more mailing lists
   • Column mapping — map a CSV column to mailing list membership, so each contact is added to the list 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 select the integration tab.

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 mailing list. 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. Here you'll find:

• Profile information — all standard and custom property values
• List memberships — which mailing lists they belong to
• Activity timeline — a chronological log of their interactions: emails received, opens, clicks, form submissions, and custom events
• Subscription status — whether they're active, unsubscribed, or blocklisted

The activity timeline 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" list 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 their subscription state and list-level settings:

• Active contacts on a list are eligible for campaigns targeting that list
• Unsubscribed contacts will not receive marketing emails
• Blocklisted contacts (from bounces or complaints) are excluded from all sends

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

Next steps

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