Contacts

Contacts are the foundation of your email marketing. Pigeon Perch helps you maintain a clean, enriched contact database with engagement tracking, location data, and flexible organization through tags and custom properties.

Adding Contacts

• Individual entry: click "Add Contact" and enter their email and profile details.
• CSV import: upload a spreadsheet with email, name, company, and other fields. The import dialog shows accepted column headers and lets you download a template CSV. Duplicate emails are handled based on your chosen strategy (skip or update).
• REST API: push contacts programmatically with POST /api/v1/contacts or the bulk import endpoint. This is ideal for syncing from your CRM, e-commerce platform, or sign-up forms. See the API documentation.

Contact Profile Fields

• Email (required): must be unique within your organization. Used for delivery and deduplication.
• First Name, Last Name: used in personalization variables ({{first_name}}).
• Phone, Company: additional profile data you can filter and segment on.
• Location: city, state, country, postal code, and timezone. This data is automatically enriched from web visits and email opens via IP geolocation, or can be set manually through the API.
• Status: indicates whether the contact is eligible to receive emails (see below).
• Tags: flexible labels for organization and segmentation. See Tags.
• Engagement Score: a 0-100 score calculated from email interactions (opens, clicks, bounces). See Web Tracking & Scoring for details on how scores are calculated.
• SMS Consent: indicates whether the contact has opted in to receive SMS messages. This field, along with SMS Consent Source (which records how consent was collected), controls eligibility for SMS campaigns and automations.
• Custom Properties: a flexible JSON field for any additional data specific to your business (plan type, purchase count, signup source, etc.).
• Location Interests: a ranked list of locations the contact has shown interest in, scored from searches, listing views, form submissions, and other activity. This goes beyond physical location by tracking where the contact wants to hear about, not just where they are. See Location Intelligence for full details.

Contact Statuses

Status determines whether a contact receives your emails. Only contacts with "subscribed" status are included in campaign sends and automation workflows.

• Subscribed: active and eligible to receive emails.
• Unsubscribed: the contact opted out of all emails. This is set when they use the unsubscribe link or manage their preferences. See Suppressions.
• Bounced: the email address is invalid or the mailbox is full. Set automatically when a delivery attempt fails with a hard bounce.
• Complained: the contact reported your email as spam. They are permanently suppressed from all sends.

Contact Hygiene

Maintaining a clean contact list is one of the most important things you can do for your email marketing. High bounce rates and spam complaints damage your sender reputation, which in turn lowers deliverability for everyone on your list.

Pigeon Perch helps by automatically suppressing bounced and complained contacts, tracking engagement scores so you can identify and clean inactive contacts, and providing suppression groups so contacts can manage their preferences instead of unsubscribing entirely.