Contacts

The basics

A contact is a person in an audience, identified by their email address. In the API, contacts are addressed by subscriber_hash — the MD5 hash of the lowercase email address — so GET /3.0/lists/{list_id}/members/{subscriber_hash} retrieves one contact from one audience.

The same person in two audiences is two contacts. Audiences don’t share contact records.

Contact status and channel subscription

Outline — expand:

• Contact-level status (active, archived) describes the contact overall.
• Channel-level subscription status describes whether they can be reached on a specific channel (email, SMS), and is computed rather than set directly.
• Inputs to that computation: the audience’s opt-in configuration (single or double opt-in), the marketing consent you supply, and deliverability.
• Consent values and the full mapping table live in Audiences endpoints (beta) while that work is in beta.

Tags

Tags are labels that help organize your contacts. You define what they mean: bring your own targeting and organization strategy into Mailchimp rather than adopting one.

You could use tags to:

• Structure campaigns for specific audiences, tagging contacts with terms like “Holiday Send” or “Influencer”
• Directly map tags from your CRM onto tags in your Mailchimp audience
• Translate behaviors—for example, a contact who’s spent $1,000 in your store—into tags that can be used in future campaigns

Tags attach to individual contacts, at /3.0/lists/{list_id}/members/{subscriber_hash}/tags. There is no audience-level tag resource; to find which contacts carry a tag, search with GET /3.0/lists/{list_id}/tag-search or build a segment that filters on it.

For a walkthrough of tagging contacts with the API, see Organize contacts with tags.

Merge field values

Each contact carries values for the merge fields its audience defines. The field has to exist on the audience before you can set a value on a contact — see Merge fields.