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Your audience is everyone Retainful knows about — customers synced from your store, subscribers from your signup forms, and contacts you’ve imported. Three concepts organize them:

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Contacts, lists, and segments

Use lists for things people opt into, and segments for behavior-based targeting. A contact can be in any number of lists and segments at once.

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Subscription status

Every contact has an email subscription status that controls what you can send them:
  • Subscribed — opted in to marketing. They receive campaigns and marketing automations.
  • Non-subscribed — known to you (for example, a customer) but never opted in to marketing. They can still receive transactional-style messages where applicable.
  • Unsubscribed — opted out. Retainful automatically excludes them from marketing sends.
Retainful enforces this for you — you can’t accidentally email someone who unsubscribed.

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Where contacts come from

  • Store sync — customers from Shopify or WooCommerce, kept up to date automatically.
  • Signup forms — subscribers captured by your popups and embedded forms.
  • Imports — CSV files from your previous email tool.
  • API — contacts created by your own systems through the REST API.

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What’s in this section

Manage contacts

View profiles, activity timelines, and engagement history.

Lists

Create and manage static groups of contacts.

Segments

Build rule-based groups that update themselves.

Import contacts

Bring subscribers from another tool with the CSV wizard.

Export contacts

Download your contacts whenever you need them.

Custom fields

Store extra information on every contact.