Contact groups

What this page is — named sets of contacts, and how to manage who is in them.

What it is for — segmenting the contact database into groups you can act on — the unit a campaign sends to.

The problem it solves — you rarely want to email everybody. Groups are how you say "these ones". This page also explains why withholding the delete permission does not stop anybody deleting a group.

Route: /org/marketing/contacts → Groups Permissions: View contact groups · .create · .edit · .managemembers

Figure 1 — Groups. Each shows its member count.

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1. What a group is

	Group	Lifecycle stage	Tag on a lead
Applies to	Contacts	Contacts and leads	Leads
Cardinality	Many-to-many	One per record	Many per lead
Managed	Explicitly, by adding members	By editing the record	By typing
Used by	Campaigns, filters	Reports	Filters

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2. Managing members

Figure 2 — Membership. Adding and removing needs the managemembers permission.

Action	Permission
See groups and their members	View contact groups
Create a group	Create New Contact Groups
Rename or edit a group	Edit Contact Groups
Add or remove members	Assign / Un-assign Members or contacts of Group
Delete a group	Edit Contact Groups — see below

Deleting a group only needs the EDIT permission

Allows deleting contact groups appears in the role editor, described as "Allows deleting contact groups", and has no effect. Deleting a group is governed by Edit Contact Groups instead.

So anyone who can rename a group can destroy it, and withholding the delete permission achieves nothing. Deletion is not recoverable through the interface, and it loses the segmentation work the group represents.

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3. Duplicates inside a group

A contact database that predates case-insensitive matching can still hold the same person twice under two records, and a group can therefore contain both. A campaign reading that group would mail them twice.

Before using a group for anything outbound, sort its members by email and merge any duplicates.

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4. The admin contract

Needs	Or
Contacts to add	Groups are empty
.managemembers	Membership is read-only
De-duplicated contacts	Members may be duplicated. Section 3

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5. Downstream

A group reaches	As
The contacts list	The Group filter
Marketing campaigns	The recipient set
Reports	A segmentation dimension

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6. Don't confuse this with…

This	Not this
A contact group	A lead queue
A group	A lifecycle stage
.group.delete	.group.edit, which is what deletion enforces

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7. Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause
A group was deleted by someone without delete	Deletion is gated on .edit. Section 2
Cannot add members	Missing .managemembers
A campaign mailed someone twice	Duplicate contacts in the group. Section 3
Group filter empty on the list	No groups exist