Purge unwanted contacts

Keep your contact database tidy and control costs by removing unwanted contacts.

Remove spam

From your list of contacts select Actions > Delete Spam. This removes contacts that the system has identified as highly likely to be spam. You can later review and reinstate any of these contacts at Actions > Recently deleted. For more see: Manage spam contacts.

Manually select people for deletion

From your list of contacts, select the contacts you wish to delete using the checkbox next to the contact name. When one or more contacts are selected a bulk actions button will appear above the list that you can use to delete all selected contacts.

Tip: When performing repetitive tasks on lots of contacts, open each in a new window.

Go to the action menu (...) next to a contact in a list and choose View.

While clicking, hold CMD+OPTION (Mac) or CONTROL+OPTION (PC) to open the link in a new tab.

Create a list of people to delete

You can use segments to create a list of contacts to delete. create a people segment with a few conditions to help identify potentially low-value contacts.

Create a segment with appropriate criteria.
Go to your list of contacts.
Apply the segment filter.
Either manually select contacts (described above) or Select all contacts using the checkbox in the table header row.
When one or more contacts are selected a bulk actions button will appear that you can use to delete all selected contacts.

TIP: Here are some example conditions that may help to identify contacts with whom you have had no meaningful interaction:

Membership plan IS NOT Any (i.e. they are not a member)

Communication type IS NOT Any (i.e. they have not opted in to receive emails from you)

Account status IS NOT Any (i.e. they have not created an online account or logged in)

Groups IS NOT Any (i.e. admins have not manually added them to any groups; you could create a group specifically to ensure certain contacts are not deleted despite their lack of activity)

Use an export

For large databases with complex needs it may be easier to identify contacts to delete using a spreadsheet. For more on exports see: Export data.