When can I email the people I just imported?
You imported two thousand people. Your audience went up by rather fewer, and not immediately. Nothing has gone wrong, and this page is the timetable.
The prompt
“I imported my list into [my site]. Tell me how many of them bernard can email, when the rest join, and what my first campaign will be capped at.”
Signed in, Get my prompt fills in your site for you. Otherwise press Copy and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard once: Use your own AI (opens in a new tab).
This page used to say imported people could never be emailed. That changed: bernard now counts permission you bring over from another email tool. The address of the page is unchanged so that every link to it still works.
A contact and an audience are different things
A contact is a record: a name, an address, some tags, some history. Anybody can be a contact. Importing a spreadsheet creates contacts.
An audience is the set of people bernard has evidence for, and it is the only thing a campaign can be sent to. Bernard works that count out from the evidence it holds, one person at a time. It never reads a number you typed and it never reads a column in a file.
Permission you bring over is evidence
If you confirmed a list during the import, each person from it carries a permission record saying where their permission came from, which list, and the date. Open any of those contacts and you can read the sentence.
That record counts. Consent belongs to your business, not to the tool that happened to write it down, and refusing to read it would not have protected anybody: it would only have kept your people on your old bill. So bernard reads it, and keeps three promises around it.
Promise one: a short wait
Permission brought over starts counting 48 hours after the import finishes. Until then the contact page says the day they join, in words, on their own record.
The wait is there so an import you regret can be undone before it reaches anybody. Undo a mailing list import takes one action and stays available.
Promise two: a capped first campaign
Your first campaign after an import reaches at most 200 of the people that import brought. The rest of your audience - everyone who filled in a form or bought something - is not capped at all, and every campaign after the first reaches everybody.
Send that first one as a plain note saying you have moved, with the unsubscribe link near the top. It is the message people are least likely to complain about and the one they most expect. The quote you approve says the capped number out loud, so you know before you agree.
Promise three: bernard stops at the first complaint
If one person you brought over marks that campaign as spam, bernard pauses campaign sending for the site and says so on your sending health card. You will not find out from a bounced reputation three months later.
That is a stop, not a punishment. Ask bernard to reopen sending and say who the campaign went to; the usual fix is to send only to the people who most recently heard from you on your old tool.
Where to see all of this
The sending health card under Email campaigns shows how many of your audience rest on permission you brought over, how many are still waiting and when they join, and the cap on your next campaign. Is my email sending healthy? explains the rest of that card.
What you should not do
Do not confirm permission for a list you cannot account for. Do not import a list you bought. The refusal that still applies to those people is the same refusal that keeps everybody else’s bought list out of your inbox, and it is the reason a bernard campaign gets delivered at all.
When do I need someone’s permission to email them? covers the underlying rules in plain words, and Bring my mailing list across from another email tool covers the import itself.
Questions people ask
- How long is the wait?
- 48 hours from the moment the import finished. Open any imported contact and the page names the day they join your audience, so you never have to work it out. The wait exists so that a list imported by mistake, or an import you want to undo, can be undone before anybody is emailed.
- Why is my first campaign capped?
- Because a brought-over list has never heard from your bernard address before, and mailbox providers judge a new address on its first few hundred messages. Your first campaign after an import reaches at most 200 of the people that import brought. Everybody else in your audience is unaffected by the cap, and every campaign after the first reaches all of them. The quote you approve says the number out loud before you agree to it.
- What happens if somebody marks that first campaign as spam?
- Bernard stops your campaign sending for that site straight away and tells you why on the sending health card. That is deliberate: one complaint from a list you brought over is the earliest honest signal that the list is not as warm as it looked, and stopping there protects the address you will be sending from for years.
- Which imported people are NOT in my audience?
- Anybody on a list you did not confirm permission for, anybody whose ActiveCampaign status was unconfirmed, and anybody who unsubscribed, bounced or was excluded. The last three are on your do-not-email list and stay there whatever happens next, including if you undo the import.
- How do the ones with no permission get in?
- Two ways only. They fill in one of your forms and click the confirmation link in the email that follows; or they buy something from you and leave the marketing box ticked at checkout. Ask them from somewhere you are still allowed to write: one last campaign from your old tool, before you switch it off, linking to a signup form on your bernard site. Bernard will draft that email and build the form.
- Can I just email everybody I uploaded?
- No. Bernard will not send to anybody it holds no evidence for, and that refusal is not adjustable. It sits underneath the send approval: when you approve a campaign, the recipient count you are approving has already had those people taken out of it.