The Contacts page is your recipient base: everyone who can receive a campaign is here. Besides phone and name, each contact keeps custom fields that become message text, the groups it belongs to and the history of everything it received. For Loja Bem Viver, the base is the customers who bought at the store and agreed to receive deals on WhatsApp.
To bring in many contacts at once, use the spreadsheet import — it is in the Import contacts article.
Create a contact
In Contacts, click New contact and fill in:
- Phone — pick the country by its flag (Brazil comes selected) and type the number with area code. SendFast checks that the number is valid for that country, including the ninth digit of Brazilian mobile numbers.
- Name — required. It is what you will use to personalize the message ("Hi, Marina").
- Group (optional) — puts the contact in a group right away. Later it can join other groups.
- Custom fields — up to 5 key and value pairs, such as cidade = Goiânia or last_purchase = Green tea.
Each phone exists only once in the account. If the number is already there, you see a message that a contact with this number already exists — find that contact and edit it.
What custom fields are for
In a campaign, each template variable can take the contact's Name, Phone or a custom field. If Camila has the cidade field on every customer, the message can say "Free shipping to Goiânia" to each one with their own city.
Always use the same key on every contact (cidade, not sometimes City or town): the campaign finds the value by the key. A contact without that field gets the variable blank — so check beforehand that the field is filled in across the whole audience.
When editing, fields you delete from the form are removed from the contact.
Finding contacts
The list shows Name, Phone, Groups and Status, newest first. Filters combine:
- Search by name or phone — accepts part of the name or number.
- Group — one group or All groups.
- Status — Active or Opted out. Note: here Active means "not opted out"; it has nothing to do with the Active/Inactive status.
- WhatsApp — Has WhatsApp or No WhatsApp.
- Custom field — shows when contacts have fields. Each option is a pair such as cidade: Goiânia, and the filter brings those with exactly that value. One pair at a time.
A contact's statuses
Three independent markers decide whether the contact goes into a campaign:
- Active / Inactive — you decide, through the Activate and Deactivate actions in the row menu. An inactive contact is left out of every campaign, but stays in the base with its full history. It is the way to take someone out of sends without losing anything.
- Opted out — the contact asked to stop receiving messages. Left out of every campaign. See the Consent and opt-out article.
- No WhatsApp — set automatically when a send comes back with the reason "Number not on WhatsApp". Left out of later campaigns, which avoids spending sends on a number that cannot receive. If the number gets WhatsApp, an Admin uses Mark as WhatsApp and the contact is included again. The action is logged with user, date and IP.
Acting on several contacts at once
Tick the row boxes and the action bar shows up, with the selected count. Pick a group in Choose a group and use:
- Add to group — adds to the group and keeps the contact's other groups.
- Move to group — removes the contact from every other group and leaves it only in the chosen one. Use with care.
- Remove from group — removes from that group only.
- Mark as WhatsApp — for people with the Admin role, clears the No WhatsApp marker of the selected contacts.
Each bulk action covers up to 500 contacts.
The contact page
Click View details in the row menu. The page brings together:
- Information — phone, name and groups;
- Custom fields;
- Consent — Opt-in active or the opt-out date, with the history;
- Message history — each campaign the contact received, with status, sent, delivered and read times and the Clicked column. When the status is a failure, the reason shows with it.
It is the screen to answer "did this customer get the promotion?" without opening campaign after campaign.
Deleting a contact
Deleting is only for people with the Admin role and is permanent: the contact goes away together with its message and consent history. If you only want to stop sending, prefer Deactivate.
Who can do what
Members and Admins create, edit, import, activate and deactivate contacts and use the group actions. Only an Admin deletes contacts, reopens opt-in and uses Mark as WhatsApp.
Where to go next
- Import contacts — bring the base from a spreadsheet.
- Consent and opt-out — how a contact leaves and how to reopen.
- Groups — split the audience for each campaign.
- Campaigns — use name and custom fields in the variables.
In short: create contacts with a valid phone, a name and up to 5 custom fields with a standard key, organize them in groups with the bulk actions, use Deactivate to take someone out of sends without deleting anything, and remember that opt-out and No WhatsApp also keep the contact out of campaigns.