Contacts

Contacts are what you pay for, so these answers are mostly about counting and losing them. Read what counts against your plan first, because the rule is not what most people assume and it decides when you have to upgrade. Importing an old list is the operation with the most ways to go wrong. If contacts are vanishing on their own, that has three documented causes and none of them is a fault.

• What counts as a contact against my plan? The four numbers, what creates a contact, and what happens on the fourth day after you pass one.
• What is a custom field, and when do I need one? Made from the contact list, not the editor. What the unique key is, and where the field shows up after that.
• Can I get deleted contacts back? There is a bin, and it holds them for 30 days. Where it is, and the row that never empties.
• What is the safest way to import an old list? The file it will take, the two things set during the import itself, and the wait afterwards.
• What actually happens when I delete a contact? It goes to a bin, not to nothing. And your contact count drops the moment it does.
• Contacts are disappearing from my list and I did not delete them. Nobody clicked delete. Software did, for one of three documented reasons.
• What happens to my automation rules when I delete a tag? The rule vanished along with the tag. A second, untouched rule proves that was a real deletion, not a page that failed to load.
• What happens to a contact already in my account when I import them again? No duplicate is created. What gets overwritten instead, and the import counter that can look like a failure for a few minutes.