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A list is a named group of contacts you manage manually. Unlike segments — which include contacts dynamically based on conditions — lists are static: you decide who’s in and who’s not by adding or removing contacts explicitly. Lists are the simplest way to slice your audience for campaigns. A contact can belong to many lists at once, and many lists can be targeted in a single campaign.

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When to Use Lists

Lists work best when membership is a deliberate choice rather than a property of the contact. Some typical uses:
  • Source-based grouping — “Newsletter Signups”, “Trade Show Leads”, “Beta Waitlist”
  • Lifecycle stage — “Onboarding Cohort October 2026”, “Renewal Outreach Q4”
  • Manual outreach — “VIP Customers”, “Press Contacts”, “Internal Test Recipients”
For groupings that should update automatically based on contact data — like “everyone with plan = pro” or “contacts who signed up in the last 30 days” — use a segment instead. Lists are not recomputed; once a contact is in, they stay until you remove them.

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Creating a List

1

Open the Lists page

Go to Audience → Lists.
2

Create the list

Click Create list, give it a clear name, and save. List names must be unique within your team.
3

Add contacts

Open the list and use Add contacts to attach existing contacts. You can also add contacts to a list from the contact’s profile page or via the Lists column on the Contacts page.

Try it in the app

Follow an interactive walkthrough of this guide inside Lettr.

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Adding and Removing Contacts

There are several entry points for managing list membership: Every list addition and removal is recorded in the contact’s activity log — except for memberships set during a CSV import, which are applied in bulk and not individually logged.
Lists can also be managed programmatically. The Audience Lists API lets you create, update, and delete lists, and attach or detach contacts in bulk from your own application.

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Renaming and Deleting Lists

You can rename a list at any time from the Lists page. Renaming does not affect the contacts inside it, but it does affect segments — see the warning below. Deleting a list removes the list itself and the membership records, but does not delete the contacts. The contacts remain in your audience and in any other lists or segments they belong to.
Segments reference lists by name, not by ID. If you rename a list that a segment uses in its conditions, that segment will silently stop matching anyone from the renamed list until you update the segment. Always check your segments after renaming a list.

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Using Lists in Campaigns

When you create a campaign, you select its audience by choosing one of three modes: all contacts, lists, or segments. In list mode, you pick one or more lists, and the campaign goes out to the union of their members — every contact in any selected list — filtered to those with status subscribed. A contact who belongs to multiple selected lists is only sent the email once. See Audience Selection for the full set of rules.

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List-Scoped Segments

When you create a segment, you can optionally scope it to a single list. The segment then only matches contacts who are members of that list and match the conditions. This is useful for further filtering a list — for example, “everyone in the Q4 onboarding list whose last_login is older than 30 days” — without affecting other contacts. See Segments for details.

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Lists vs. Topics vs. Segments

It’s easy to confuse these three concepts. A quick decision guide: You can combine all three in any campaign.

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Next Steps

Topics

Let contacts opt in and out of subscription categories

Segments

Build dynamic groups that update themselves

Campaigns

Send an email to a list