What happens to my lists and tags when I bring my list across?
If you are coming from ActiveCampaign, the first thing that looks missing is your lists. They are not missing. They arrive as tags, and this page is what that means in practice.
One person, one permission
In ActiveCampaign a contact holds a status per list: Active on one, Unsubscribed on another. That is why a person can be reachable and unreachable at the same time depending on which list you are looking at.
Bernard does not work that way. Permission is a fact about a person on your site, held once. Somebody who unsubscribes from you unsubscribes from you, not from one of your lists. Tags are how you group people; they never carry permission and they never override it.
That is the whole reason an audience count in bernard can be trusted: there is only one place to look.
How your lists arrive
At the upload step you tell bernard which list each file came from. Every list
you name becomes a tag in the shape list: followed by the name, applied to
everyone in that file. Your ActiveCampaign tags come across as themselves, split
out of the single column they were exported in.
So a person who was on your Newsletter list and tagged wholesale and
glasgow arrives with three tags: list:Newsletter, wholesale, glasgow.
Renaming and dropping, before anything is written
The report you approve has a Rename a tag block listing every tag found, each with a box.
- Type a new name and that tag arrives under the new name.
- Clear the box and that tag is dropped. The people still arrive; they just do not carry it.
- Leave it alone and it comes across as it is.
Renaming is worth a minute. list:Newsletter 2019 (old) is a name you inherited
from a tool you are leaving. Tidy it now, while it is one box, rather than on
two thousand contacts later.
Change anything here and the report goes stale, because your approval names one exact plan. Read it again and approve the new one. What does my mailing list import report mean? explains why bernard is strict about that.
What to keep and what to drop
Keep anything that describes the person: what they bought, where they signed up, what they are interested in, which course they took. Those are the things you will want to narrow a campaign to.
Drop anything that only described how ActiveCampaign was working: tags an automation set to remember where somebody was in a sequence, tags used as temporary flags, tags from a campaign you sent once in 2021. None of it means anything here, and every one of them is a line in a picker you have to read past forever.
Using them afterwards
A campaign audience starts from people bernard holds permission for and can then
be narrowed by tag: everyone who has said yes and is tagged wholesale. The
count updates as you pick, and it stays lawful, because narrowing can only ever
make a lawful group smaller. You can save that combination under a name and pick
it next time. Send to one group of my mailing list, not everyone covers it properly.
You can also add and remove tags in bulk from the contacts page, up to 200 people at a time, so a grouping you wish you had made at import time is not lost to you.
One honest limit
Tags are the only grouping you control. There are no custom-field segments yet, so the ActiveCampaign fields that come across sit on each contact as readable notes rather than as something you can filter on. If your ActiveCampaign work depended on segmenting by field, that is a real gap and worth knowing before you move rather than after. Move my mailing list from ActiveCampaign lists the rest of them.
The prompt
“Show me which tags my ActiveCampaign import would create on [my site], and help me decide which ones to rename or drop.”
Press Copy, then paste it into your AI and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard first - a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI.
Questions people ask
- Where did my lists go?
- Each list you named at the upload step becomes a tag called list, a colon, and the name you gave it. So a list called Newsletter becomes the tag list:Newsletter on everybody who was on it. Nobody is lost; the grouping just has a different shape.
- Why does bernard not have lists?
- Because in ActiveCampaign a list carries its own subscription status, and in bernard permission is a fact about a person rather than a property of a container. One person, one permission, wherever they are tagged. It is the difference that makes an audience count trustworthy.
- Can I rename a tag before it is created?
- Yes. The report you approve lists every tag it found with a box beside it. Type a new name to rename it, or clear the box to drop it. Changing anything makes the report stale, so read it again and approve the new one.
- Should I drop tags?
- Drop the ones that only made sense inside ActiveCampaign, such as automation bookkeeping tags. Keep anything that describes the person: what they bought, where they came from, what they are interested in. If in doubt keep it, because adding a tag later to two thousand people is harder than ignoring one.
- What if a contact already has that tag here?
- It stays as it is. An import never removes a tag and never duplicates one, and a tag a contact already carried is not the import's to take away when you undo it.
- Can I send to just one tag?
- Yes, and that is the point of them. A campaign audience can be narrowed to a tag, and the count stays lawful: it is still only people bernard holds permission for, with that tag. You can save the combination under a name and reuse it.
- How many tags can one audience use?
- Up to 20 in a saved audience. That is far more than anybody needs; if you are near it, the grouping probably wants simplifying rather than extending.