# Contacts and audiences

Add the people you email one by one, from a CSV file or from your CRM, store custom properties on them and keep their consent.

A **contact** is one email address your business sends marketing email to, with a first and last name, your own properties (city, membership tier, number of orders…) and its consent. Each address exists once in the business, and the same contact can belong to many segments. Everything lives under **Email → Audiences**, in the **Contacts**, **Segments**, **Topics**, **Properties** and **Suppressions** tabs.

Viewing contacts needs the **View** level on the Email module; adding, importing and changing them needs **Manage**.

![The contacts list of the audience](https://hatang.dev/help/img/en/email/contacts.webp)

## Add contacts

### One by one

1. Open **Email → Audiences**.
2. Under **Add contact**, enter the email address, **First name** and **Last name**.
3. Optionally pick a segment to add the contact to.
4. Click **Add**.

Adding an address that already exists updates that contact instead of creating a second one.

### Import a CSV file

1. Prepare a CSV file whose first row names the columns. Ha Tang reads `email` (required), `first_name`, `last_name`, `unsubscribed` and the key of each of your properties, in any order. Other columns are ignored.
2. Under **Import CSV**, choose the file or paste its content, and optionally a segment to put everyone in.
3. Click **Import**.

The result says how many contacts were imported and how many rows were skipped (rows without a valid address). Existing addresses are updated, not duplicated.

```text
email,first_name,last_name,city,tier
thuha@example.com,Hà,Nguyễn,Hà Nội,Vàng
quan.tran@example.com,Quân,Trần,TP. Hồ Chí Minh,Bạc
```

> [!WARNING]
> Only import people who agreed to receive your email: customers who ticked a newsletter box, signed up at your shop or bought from you recently. Bought or scraped lists bring bounces and spam reports that quickly send all your email, including order confirmations, to the spam folder.

In the `unsubscribed` column, `true`, `1`, `yes` or `có` marks the contact as unsubscribed from everything; use it to carry over unsubscribes from your previous email tool.

### From your CRM

If you use Ha Tang's Customers module, **Customers → Sync to Email** copies customers with an email address into contacts. Syncing never resubscribes someone who unsubscribed.

### From your website

Your developer can create or update contacts through the API whenever someone signs up. See the [contacts guide in the developer hub](https://hatang.dev/docs/guides/email/audiences).

## Custom properties

Properties are your own fields on contacts, used to personalise email and to decide who gets what.

1. Open the **Properties** tab.
2. Enter a **Key** (letters, digits and `_`, for example `city`), choose the **Type** (`string` or `number`) and optionally a **Fallback**.
3. Click **Add property**.

Use a property in a template or broadcast as `{{{contact.city}}}`. A contact without a value gets the fallback, so "Xin chào khách ở {{{contact.city}}}" never shows a gap. A property must exist before you import or set it on contacts. Deleting a property removes its value from every contact.

## Work with one contact

Click an address in the list to open the contact. There you can:

- change the name and property values under **Details**,
- see and change the segments it belongs to,
- see its choice for each topic (or the topic's default when it has not chosen),
- read every email sent to it, with its status,
- **Unsubscribe** or **Resubscribe** it.

To add many contacts to a segment at once, tick them in the list and use **Add to segment** under **Selected contacts**.

## Unsubscribed contacts

A contact who clicks "unsubscribe from everything", or whom you unsubscribe, is shown as **Unsubscribed** and:

- receives no more broadcasts or automation emails,
- is added to the suppression list with the reason **unsubscribe**, which also blocks order confirmations and other emails to that address.

If the person asks to receive your email again, open the contact and click **Resubscribe**. That also removes the suppression entry. Someone who only wants fewer emails should leave a topic instead; see [Segments and topics](https://hatang.dev/help/email/segments-and-topics).

## Good habits

- Use one contact list for the whole business, and segments to divide it. Deleting a segment never deletes its contacts.
- Fill in first names: "Chào chị Hà" is opened more often than "Chào bạn".
- Remove or stop emailing people who have not opened anything for months. They lower your engagement and your reputation with Gmail and others. See [Keep your email out of spam](https://hatang.dev/help/email/deliverability).