Contact Records Overview

  • Updated

The Contact Records section is where you find, understand, and manage individual people in your Act-On account. Different tools answer different questions: who is this person, what have they done, is their information current, and when a record needs to go, how do you remove it the right way? This page is a map to the right tool for each job.

Who does this: Marketing ops day to day. Compliance or privacy owners when a contact needs to be erased under a data-subject request
Time needed: 5 minutes to orient; each task below has its own article with step-by-step detail
Why this matters: Clean, accurate contact data is the quiet foundation of everything else you do in Act-On. Good data keeps segments tight, lead scores honest, and privacy requests easy to answer. Bad data suppresses sends, muddies reports, and creates compliance risk.
In plain English: Think of Contact Records as the people side of Act-On. Lists are groups, segments are filters, programs do work - but contacts are the individuals underneath all of it. This section is about interacting with those individuals one at a time.
Quick Reference (Advanced Users) - Click to Expand
  • Search All Contacts: find anyone across every list by name, email, or other field.
  • Contact Report: review engagement, list membership, scoring, CRM links.
  • Edit Contact: update field values from the Info tab in the Contact Report.
  • Delete Contact: remove a record from one specific list only.
  • Erase Contact: permanently remove all personal data tied to an email address across Act-On. Used for privacy requests.
  • Delete Duplicates: clean up repeated email addresses inside a Marketing List.
  • Use Audience Center > All Contacts as the central hub to prevent duplicates and keep updates consistent.
Try it like this: Use Search All Contacts to find someone, open their Contact Report to review engagement and list membership, then correct anything out of date from the Info tab. Three clicks end to end.

What you can do with Contact Records

Each tool below has a different purpose. The article links walk through the full steps.

Use Search All Contacts when you know something about the person - email domain, first name, company - and want to find them without browsing through lists. It's the fastest way in when you're starting from a name or an email the customer gave you.

See Searching for a Contact.

Review a contact's details

The Contact Report shows everything Act-On knows about the person in one view:

  • Engagement and behaviour history across messages, forms, pages, and media
  • List membership across your whole account
  • Lead scores and the breakdown of how they were earned
  • CRM-linked records
  • Editable field values for quick corrections

See The Contact Report.

Update a contact's field values

If something needs correcting - a company name, a region, a spelling - you can edit the contact directly from the Info tab inside their Contact Report. No export, re-import, or mass-update program required.

See Editing a Contact.

Manage or remove records

Three different removal actions cover three different situations. Picking the wrong one either leaves data behind or removes more than you intended.

  • Delete Contact: removes the record from one specific list only. The contact still exists elsewhere in your account.
  • Delete Duplicates: cleans up repeated email addresses inside a single Marketing List. Useful after imports.
  • Erase Contact: permanently removes all personal data across Act-On. This is the tool for privacy requests - it's irreversible.

See Deleting Duplicate Records in a List and Erase a Contact.

Work with a clean, central database

Managing contacts from Audience Center > All Contacts helps prevent duplicates, cuts down on conflicting updates, and gives you one place where every change applies across lists and segments at once. If you spend any real time on contact hygiene, make this your default view.

Why Contact Records matter

Clean contact data lets you:

  • Send targeted messages to the right people
  • Improve segmentation and lead scoring accuracy
  • Reduce suppressed sends caused by duplicates or bad addresses
  • Keep your account aligned with privacy requirements (GDPR, CCPA, and similar)
  • Give your sales team complete, reliable customer data

Learn more

Each article below covers one task in detail:

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