Contact
A contact is a person in your audience: an address, a name, and whatever else you know about them. Contacts are the unit marketing email is addressed to, and the place consent is recorded, so a contact is also where you answer the only question that matters before a send. May we write to this person, and about what.
At a glance
- Category
- Audience
- Identified by
- An email address, unique within your audience
- Carries
- Properties, an unsubscribed flag and topic subscriptions
- Used by
- Segments, broadcasts and automations
- Consent lives
- On the contact, not on the campaign
How it works
A contact is created when somebody gives you their address, either through your own signup form or through an API call from your product. Beyond the address it holds properties you have declared — a plan name, a signup date, a country — each with a type, so a filter can compare them reliably. It also holds the two facts that govern sending: whether the person has unsubscribed from marketing altogether, and which of your topics they are subscribed to.
Why it matters
Everything about a marketing send is decided from the contact, so a sloppy contact record produces sloppy mail. A property stored as free text cannot be filtered on without guessing at spellings, a contact created without recording where consent came from cannot be defended if anybody asks, and an address kept after an unsubscribe is a complaint waiting to be filed. The record is also the only place a reader's preferences can survive a change of campaign, tool or team.
Example
Somebody signs up for a trial, and your code creates a contact with their address, their plan as a property and the signup date. They tick a box asking for product news, so the product news topic is subscribed. Later they open the preference page from a footer link and turn that topic off, leaving the account notices on. The contact still exists, still receives transactional mail, and is now excluded from the next newsletter without any code changing.
Common mistakes
- 01Storing everything as free text, so a segment on plan has to match four spellings of the same value.
- 02Deleting a contact to stop mailing them, which loses the record that they asked to be left alone.
- 03Copying contacts between systems without their consent state, so an unsubscribe silently becomes a subscription again.
- 04Recording a contact without noting where the consent came from, so nobody can answer the only question that matters when a complaint arrives.
In Rasket
Contacts carry properties you declare with types, an unsubscribed flag, and a subscription for each of your topics. Broadcasts
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
Is a contact the same as a user?
Not necessarily. A contact is an address you may write to, which can exist before anybody has an account and can outlive one. Many teams keep the two separate and link them by address.
What happens if a contact unsubscribes?
Marketing mail to that address stops, including broadcasts and automation sends. Transactional mail such as a password reset still goes out, because an unsubscribe is a statement about marketing rather than about service messages.
Should I delete contacts who never open anything?
Consider removing them from your sending list rather than deleting the record. A long-inactive address is a deliverability risk, and keeping the record documents that you stopped mailing them deliberately.
Last updated 16 September 2026.
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