Contacts

Contacts lists everyone who has messaged your connected Instagram and Facebook accounts, whether they wrote to you or answered an automation. It sits under Results in the menu, because chat, email and imports all add to it.

What a contact is

One contact per person and account. Someone who wrote to both your Instagram account and your Facebook Page appears twice, once per channel, because Meta gives each channel its own id for the person. A contact is the same record as the conversation in the inbox: click a row and the thread opens.

Each row shows the name (or the platform id until the name is known), the channel, tags, email, the last message with its time, and the initials of the assigned member. Closed threads are marked.

Tags

Tags are defined in Chat settings, at the top of the Inbox, with an optional folder and a colour, and applied from the thread in the inbox. Deleting a tag removes it from every list and filter; the contacts keep working.

Fields

Custom fields are defined in Chat settings: a key (lowercase letters, digits and underscores, used in exports), a label and a type (text, number, date, date and time, yes or no, or a list). Values are edited in the Contact panel of a thread. Deleting a definition keeps the values already stored.

Email

An email is collected by an automation's Ask for their email step or entered by the team in the contact panel, and the panel says which. If you define a custom field with the key email, an address collected by an automation is written there too. Every address is checked before it is saved: a typo in a common domain gets a suggestion ("did you mean anna [at] gmail.com?"), and an address that cannot receive email, such as one whose domain takes no mail or with letters like å before the @, is refused with the reason.

Search and filters

Search by name or email in the box at the top of the list. Press Filters to filter by tag, source, birthday, channel, status (open or closed), activity, buying and Has email. On a phone the filters open from the bottom of the screen. Every filter that is on shows as a chip under the search, with the number of contacts that match. Press the x on a chip to take that filter off, or Clear all to take them all off. Pick Email only under channel to see the people who came from a signup form or an import and have never written to you on Instagram or Facebook. The list holds up to 10,000 contacts; the filters work within those.

CSV export

Export CSV, under More at the top right, downloads the filtered list with the columns name, platform, channel, email, tags, status, assignedTo, lastMessageAt, createdAt and optOut, plus one column per custom field. The file opens correctly in Excel and Numbers. Inside the mobile app it goes to the share sheet instead.

GDPR

The export is the CSV. Deleting the workspace (Settings, General, Danger zone) deletes every contact with their messages, tags, fields and click history.

Delete a contact

When a person asks you to erase their data, open their contact card (in Contacts, or Contact in the inbox thread), press Delete contact at the bottom and then Delete for good. Owners and editors can do it. It deletes:

• the conversation with every message, tag, field and click,
• the person's comments on that channel and scheduled automation steps for them,
• their email details, also addresses the contact had before you changed it, and notification emails about them still in Postfjord,
• the address in your Mailchimp audience, when Mailchimp is connected. Mailchimp then refuses to import that address again.

If the person unsubscribed from your emails, Postfjord keeps a scrambled marker of the address (a hash, not the address itself) so nobody in the workspace can email them again. The same goes for a person who wrote STOP to your automations: a scrambled marker of their id on that channel remains, so if they write or comment again later they start as a new contact who is still opted out, and no automation messages them.

A person who wrote on both Instagram and Facebook is two contacts: delete both. While another contact still has the same email address, that address stays in Mailchimp and its email settings stay too.

Names, fields and tags

Add name and birthday fields, under More, creates First name, Last name, Birthday and Phone in one click. A contact with a first or last name shows it in the list, with the Instagram name underneath. The small Columns button at the right end of the table header shows any contact field in the table, and search looks through the fields too. On a phone each contact is a card with the name, the email status, the tags and the day you last talked. Tap a person to see the rest.

Click a contact to open its card: edit the email, fields and tags right there, or jump to the conversation. To tag many at once, tick them, choose a tag and press Add tag or Remove tag.

Merge contacts

Sometimes one person is two contacts. Say they got your DM on Instagram, and before that they signed up with their email on a form. Then you have an Instagram contact and an email contact. Merge them to keep one.

1. Tick both contacts in the list and press Merge contacts. Or open one of them: under Maybe the same person you see contacts with the same email address or the same name, each with a Merge button. A contact that signed up through someone's DM link with an address another contact already had is listed first, with a note.
2. Read what will happen, then press Merge contacts.

This is what happens:

• The Instagram or Facebook contact stays, with all its messages and its name.
• It gets the email address, when it has none.
• It gets the tags of both contacts.
• Empty fields are filled in from the other contact. Fields it has stay as they are.
• Whether the address can get emails stays as it is, because that belongs to the address.
• Email automations that start on a tag can start for the address, for tags it did not have before.
• If one of them said stop, the stop stays.
• Bookings and purchases move over to the contact that stays.
• The other contact is removed. You cannot undo a merge.

Owners and editors can merge. Two conversations from Instagram, Facebook or another channel cannot be merged yet, since each has its own messages. Two contacts with different email addresses cannot be merged either: change or remove one of the addresses first.

Segments, source and activity

Filter the list and press Save as segment, next to the filter chips, to keep the filter under a name, like "Birthday club with email". Pick a segment from the segment button next to the search to apply it again. To delete one, pick it and press Delete segment at the bottom of the same menu: the contacts stay as they are. A segment can be exported, synced to Mailchimp and used in automations as a condition (In segment).

Source shows how a contact first reached you: a comment, a story reply, a story mention, a link or QR code, or a DM. Activity is hot when they wrote in the last week and wrote at least three times or clicked a link, warm when they wrote in the last month, and cold otherwise. The Birthday filter finds birthdays this month or next month from the Birthday field.

Buying looks at the purchases Postfjord counted for a contact (Stripe, Shopify or your pages), and only when there are at least two:

• Due to buy again: as long since the last purchase as the time they usually take between purchases, but not yet twice as long. Someone who buys about every 40 days and last bought 50 days ago is due.
• At risk: twice as long or more since the last purchase.

The contact card says it in words, like "Buys about every 40 days. Last purchase 50 days ago." Save the filter as a segment and send a win back email to it. A segment you use to start an automation starts it when a contact changes, not when time passes, so send to these segments as an email instead.

A contact with the same email on Instagram and Facebook shows 2 accounts; the Mailchimp export joins them into one row.

Import

Import contacts at the top of the list brings in your email list from another tool as a CSV file. An owner or an editor chooses the file and matches the columns, and the owner finishes the import. Imported people show under Email only until they write to you. See Import contacts from a file.

Export and Mailchimp

Both exports are under More at the top right. Export CSV downloads every contact in the list as CSV, or only the ticked ones. Mailchimp CSV downloads the contacts that have an email address in Mailchimp's import format: Email Address, First Name, Last Name, Birthday (MM/DD), Tags and the Instagram handle. In Mailchimp choose Audience, Import contacts, Upload a file.

FAQ