Email Marketing: Understanding Contacts and Subscribers

When choosing recipients for your email campaigns, you'll notice the option to send to different groups (e.g. subscribers) or contacts. Understanding the difference between the types of recipients can help your email credibility and maintain a good sender reputation. 

A contact is anyone who has interacted with your website or whom you've added to your database. This includes individuals who have reached out through your site's contact form, those you've manually added, and any imported contact lists. These contacts are crucial for tailoring your messaging and building meaningful relationships.

Wix measures your contacts' behavior over time to discern who is an active contact and who is inactive. Understanding the status of a contact helps provide guidance for the deliverability of your email campaign. 

An active contact is someone who engages positively, and shows genuine interest in your newsletters. For example, they might open your newsletters regularly and click inside. 

Inactive users are contacts who do not regularly engage with your newsletters. They may have left your newsletters unopened, unsubscribed, or marked them as spam. A contact turns inactive when a week passes after they have received at least 5 email marketing campaigns or automated emails and have not opened or clicked any of them.

Any inactive contacts automatically become active again once they open an email campaign or an email from an automation they've triggered.

Subscribers are contacts who have given permission for you to send them marketing emails (e.g. newsletters or updates). Subscribers are key to your marketing because their choice to subscribe shows they are interested in your brand and want to learn more about what you offer.

Contacts usually subscribe by signing up through a subscribe form or confirming consent in an email.