Managing customers (contacts)

Contacts are the people records in Zalify Reach. Every person you email, chat with, or capture through a form or your store lives here, and you manage them from the contacts area of Reach.

This article covers what a contact profile contains, the four ways contacts are created, and how to find contacts with search and filters.

Anatomy of a contact profile

Open any contact to see their full profile. It has three main parts:

Properties. The contact's stored attributes: email address, name, and any other fields collected from forms, orders, or manual entry. Properties are what you use to personalize emails and to build segment rules (see Lists and segments).

Activity timeline. A chronological feed of everything Reach knows about the contact: form submissions, emails received, opens and clicks, orders, and site activity tracked by the Zalify pixel. Use the timeline to answer "what happened with this person?" before replying to a support conversation or debugging an automation. For email events specifically, see the Email activity feed.

Email and subscription status. Whether the contact is subscribed, unsubscribed, or suppressed. This status controls whether Reach will send marketing email to the contact at all, so check it first when someone reports not receiving your emails. The rules behind each state are covered in Subscription status, consent & unsubscribes.

If the contact belongs to a business account, their profile also shows the company they are associated with — see Companies (B2B).

How contacts are created

Contacts enter Reach in four ways:

1. Manually. You add a single contact by hand, or import contacts in bulk.
2. Via forms and popups. When a visitor submits a form built in Z1 Canvas and running on your site, Reach creates (or updates) a contact and adds them to the list the form feeds. See Connecting a form to a list.
3. Via the Zalify pixel. When the pixel identifies a visitor (for example, after they enter an email address on your site), Reach creates a contact and starts attributing their site activity to the profile. See Zalify pixel and Reach.
4. Via order webhooks. When your store sends an order webhook to Zalify, Reach creates a contact for the buyer if one doesn't already exist, and records the order on their timeline.

If the same person arrives through more than one channel, Reach matches on their email address so activity lands on one profile rather than creating duplicates.

Create a contact manually

1. Open the contacts area in Reach.
2. Choose the option to add a new contact.
3. Enter the contact's email address — this is the one required field — plus any other properties you have.
4. Save. The new contact appears in your contacts list immediately.

Contacts you create manually should be people who gave you permission to email them. Adding an address by hand does not by itself establish marketing consent — see Subscription status, consent & unsubscribes.

Search and filter contacts

To find a specific person, use the search box in the contacts area and search by email address or name.

To find groups of contacts, use filters. Filters let you narrow the contacts list by properties and status — for example, all subscribed contacts, or all contacts with a given property value.

If you find yourself applying the same filter repeatedly, build it as a segment instead. A segment saves the rules and keeps its membership up to date automatically, and you can use it directly as a broadcast or automation audience. See Lists and segments.

Related articles

• Lists and segments
• Companies (B2B)
• Subscription status, consent & unsubscribes
• Connecting a form to a list
• Zalify pixel and Reach