Where do the people who buy, join or ask end up?
Say Tracy sells mugs and teaches a Tuesday evening glazing course. Before now, the people who bought a mug, the people on the course register, and the people who’d emailed asking about commissions lived in three places that never spoke to each other - an order list, a course roll and an inbox. Contacts is the one place they all land.
The prompt
“Show me my contacts (who’s bought from me, who’s on a course, who’s asked to hear from me) and tell me who I’m actually allowed to email.”
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Where this lives
Contacts is one tab on the Your customers page, alongside three others: Email campaigns, where you write and send one-off news; Templates, ready-made starting points for a campaign; and Automatic emails, the journeys that welcome, thank and check in on people by themselves. This article is about the Contacts tab - the book itself. How do email campaigns work? and How do automatic emails work? cover the other two ways of reaching the people in it.
How it fills itself
- A sale - the moment someone buys from your shop, they appear here: name, email, what they bought, when. You don’t add them.
- A course - sign up for your Tuesday class and the same thing happens.
- A form on your site - a waiting list, a PDF download, a sign-up sheet - anyone who fills one in appears here too. See Tell people when my next course opens, Trade a PDF for someone’s email address and Sign people up for my event, class or workshop for the three you can ask Bernard to build.
- Your own list - bring a spreadsheet you’ve kept for years and import it in one go.
- A website invitation - inviting somebody to an invitation-only site adds User logins to the same contact. It does not replace Buyer, Student or any other type. Manage who can log in to my website explains the separate grant that decides whether they can enter now.
What’s recorded alongside each person
Not just a name and email - what they agreed to, and when. Someone who joined your waiting list agreed to hear about that course, nothing more. Someone who bought a mug agreed to nothing beyond their receipt unless they ticked a box saying otherwise. Bernard keeps that distinction per person, which is what makes it possible to answer, honestly, the question every list eventually needs answering: who am I actually allowed to write to, and about what? See When do I need someone’s permission to email them? for the full answer.
A person who has separately agreed to it also carries a record of what they opened and clicked, on their own page under Opens and clicks - Has this person opened anything I sent? is that section, and who is and is not in it.
Your own details on a person
Alongside what bernard fills in for you, you can ask Bernard to keep your own fields on a person too - a renewal date, a membership level, anything your business needs. Each person’s Details card shows every field and its value, “Not filled in” when nothing is set. See Can I keep my own details on a contact, like a membership level or a renewal date? for how to add one and set it.
Taking it with you
The book is yours, and you can download it whenever you like. The file carries the consent record with it - who can be emailed, why, and when they agreed - plus your do-not-email list as a file of its own, so a list you hand to another service stays lawful there too. See Can I download my contacts, with who I’m allowed to email?.
Telling another tool
If another tool needs to know when someone joins your contacts, is given a tag, or moves through one of your courses, bernard can tell it as it happens, through Zapier or a similar service. You see exactly which personal data goes, and to whom, before anything is switched on. See Tell another tool when a student finishes a lesson, a course or joins my list.
It works the other way too. Another tool, such as ThriveCart, Zapier or Make, can send people into your contacts: add or update a person, give them a tag, start one of your automatic emails, or enrol them on a course. Only the account owner can switch that on, after seeing exactly what the other tool will be able to do. See Let another tool add people to my contacts, tag them or enrol them.
Questions people ask
- Do I have to set anything up for people to start appearing here?
- No. Anyone who buys from your shop or joins a course appears the moment they do - name, email, what they bought, when. If you ask Bernard to build you a waiting list, a sign-up sheet or a download form, anyone who fills it in appears the same way. Nothing to switch on.
- Can I bring in people I already know about - my old mailing list?
- Yes. Bring a spreadsheet and it imports in one step, with duplicates skipped - ask Bernard to import a CSV of your existing list.
- Can Bernard email these people for me?
- Yes. Press ‘New campaign’ on the Email campaigns tab: tell Bernard what you want to say, a sale, a new course, a bit of news, and he’ll write it in your voice. You read it, pick who it goes to, and say when. Building the list and being allowed to write to it stay two different things, so anyone who hasn’t agreed to hear from you is left out of the sending, automatically.
- Who can see this list?
- Only you, from your own dashboard - it’s private to your account. If you ask your connected AI to help tidy it up, that’s something you switch on deliberately, on a screen that says plainly what it can see, not something that comes bundled with website editing. Every change it makes still waits on your approval like everything else.