How do I remove contacts from the CRM?

 

There are a few ways to remove CRM contacts, depending on the volume of contacts you want to remove.

To remove individual contacts

Within the CRM, you can access the contact and then select the dropdown next to the “New Note” button. One of the options in that dropdown is “Delete Contact”. Once you select it, a prompt will appear to confirm that you want to delete the contact. Select the “Confirm” button to delete them or click cancel to cancel.

To remove lists of contacts

To delete larger groups of contacts, you can use a list. To do so, go to the lists page of the CRM and then select the checkbox next to the list of contacts you want to delete. A “Delete” button will appear.

When you select the button, a prompt will appear with two checkboxes. To delete all the contacts within the list from the CRM, you need to select both checkboxes. The first optional checkbox is what causes the system to delete the contacts within the list. If it is left unchecked, the list will be deleted without deleting the contacts. Once the checkboxes are selected, click the “Delete” button in the prompt to delete the contacts, or click cancel to cancel.

If you do not already have a list of the contacts you want to delete, you will need to create one. The Search Contacts tool can help you set up a filter that will be used to populate a list that you can then delete.

 

To create filters of existing lists

To create a filtered list of contacts, open the Search Contacts tool on the CRM from the sidebar. By default, the tool is set to search for all contacts from the entire CRM. If you only want to delete contacts from a specific list, you can select a list from the Search Lists row of the tool and add it as a rule. Select the list from the Search Lists dropdown and then add it to the filter using the Add button. This will change the “All contacts” text in the filter description section to the name of the list.

Next, you can specify a filter using the various filter options. To demonstrate, we’ll use two common filter options that are frequently used for removing contacts.

To create filters of unsendable contacts

Unsendable contacts are contacts you can’t send messages to. These include contacts that have no contact method, those who have hard bounced, or those who are unsendable for other reasons. To create a filter that finds unsendable contacts, go to the Advanced Column row of the Search Contacts tool, and select the “email_sendable” column. Then, set it to use the “is equal to” rule with a value of 0.

Finally, select the add button at the end of the row. This will add the filter to the filter description section.

To create filters of inactive contacts

Another option is to remove contacts who don’t open your messages. These contacts are inactive and will often just take up space in your CRM. To create a filter that finds these inactive contacts, go to the Date Column row of the Search Contacts tool, and select the “email_last_open” column. Then, you have two options: you can either use an “Absolute Time” value that is before a specific date, or you can use a relative time that is greater than a specified amount of time before now.

For example, to remove all the contacts that haven’t opened an email since the start of the year, you can set the filter to use a rule that checks for an email_last_open date that is before the absolute time of January 1^st of the current year.

Alternatively, to remove all the contacts that haven’t opened an email within the past year, you can set the filter to use a relative time value that checks for a time that is “less than” the time it was 1 year before now.

Whatever date range you choose, once you’ve set up your filter’s rule, click the Add button at the end of the row to add that filter to the filter description section.

To create the filtered list of contacts

Once your filter is set up and the proper rules are in the filter description, go down to the “What do we do with results” section and select “Create a new list” from the dropdown menu. Give the list a name, and then select the “Go!” button.

If you are using a filter to search through all contacts, you will be prompted to confirm that you want to run the filter – click the “Yes” button to confirm.

The list will begin generating. Head back to the list page of the CRM to track its progress. Once the list is finished generating, we strongly recommend you open it and review its contents to ensure that your filter includes only contacts you want to remove.

Once you have confirmed that you do indeed want to remove the contacts in the list from the CRM, simply follow the instructions in the section above that outline deleting lists of contacts.

If you run into any issues or need further assistance, you can always contact your account manager or our customer care team for additional assistance.