Help · Audience

Lists

A list is a container. You put people on it, and they stay on it until somebody takes them off. Nothing else moves them: not a change in what they buy, not a change in what they want to hear from you.

That is what makes a list different from a segment. A segment is a question that keeps re-answering itself — write the rule, and who matches follows from the rule, this minute and every minute after. A list holds whoever was put there. Both live under Audience, one item apart, and they answer different needs: use a segment when the rule is the point, and a list when the people are.

Your lists

Under Audience, Lists shows every list you have, one row each.

Search by name. Type more than one word and every one of them has to match, wherever each of them falls and in any order — searching Mother 2026 finds a list called Mother's Day 2026 buyers. Use Show to switch between your lists and the Archived ones. Both live in the address, so opening a list and coming back — with Back or the All lists breadcrumb — returns you to the view you left.

The columns are Name, People, and Last added.

• People carries both numbers: how many people are on the list, and how many of them are eligible for marketing, with the clock time that pair was measured, in your store's time zone.
• Last added is when somebody last joined. A list nobody has ever been added to reads Nobody yet.
• A list nobody has counted yet reads Not counted yet rather than showing a zero. Empty and uncounted are different news, and a zero would be a measurement nobody took. You do not have to do anything about it: the numbers appear on their own shortly after an import, and opening a list counts it there and then.

Paging. Under the table you choose how many to show at a time — 25, 50 or 100 per page — and step through with Previous and Next. The line beside them says where you are: Page 3 of 5. Type a number in the box to jump straight to a page. The page you are on is part of the address, so opening a list and coming back puts you back where you were, and the size you choose is remembered the next time you open this screen. Searching or changing a filter takes you back to the first page. Very occasionally we cannot count your lists quickly enough to say how many pages there are; when that happens the line says Page 3 and nothing more, rather than guessing.

Create list asks for a name and, if you want one, a description. The description is a note for your team — it is never shown to anyone on the list.

Viewers can read these screens. Creating, renaming, adding, removing and archiving are for owners, managers and marketers.

Adding a segment's people to a list

On a segment's own page, Add these people to a list puts everyone the segment matches onto a list you choose. It is how lists get filled.

It is a copy, not a link. The dialog says so before you confirm: This adds the people who match right now. The list does not follow the segment afterward.

This is the one thing about lists worth reading twice. Once the copy is made, the two go their own ways:

• Somebody who starts matching the segment tomorrow is not added to the list.
• Somebody who stops matching the segment stays on the list.
• Editing the segment's rule, renaming it, or deleting it altogether moves nobody on any list built from it.

If you want the list to catch up with the segment later, add the segment's people again. Anyone already on the list stays exactly as they were, with the day they first joined intact.

A segment can hold a great many people, so the adding happens in the background. You get a notice with a link to the list, and the list fills over the next few moments — a large one may take a few minutes. Nobody is emailed by it, and nobody's consent changes.

Importing people onto a list

You can import a file of people straight onto a list: open the list and choose Import — the import mark at the top of the page, or the same word in the ⋮ menu beside it — and everyone the file imports also lands here. It is the same import you would start from the Profiles screen, with the list filled in for you.

Everything the importer does applies — including that some people arrive ready to email and some wait until we know their address still works. The Import people page explains what each column means and how to get the waiting ones moving.

Membership is not consent

Putting somebody on a list does not subscribe them. Taking them off does not unsubscribe them. Nothing on these screens writes consent, and nothing on them can.

That is deliberate, and it is what makes lists useful. A person who has asked never to be emailed can sit on a list perfectly legitimately — a list of addresses to look at, a cohort you are keeping track of, a group you mean to deal with later. The list organizes; the consent rules decide what may be sent.

So the members table shows each person's consent as a fact to read, beside their name, and the dialog you get before removing anybody says the same thing in the moment it matters most: This takes them off this list only. Any other lists they are on are untouched, and their consent does not change — if they agreed to receive marketing email, they still do.

Mailing the people on a list

Campaigns are sent to segments, so a list reaches an inbox through one: build a segment whose rule says anyone who is on the list Newsletter, and send to that. The condition lives under Is on a list in the segment builder, and it can be combined with everything else there — anyone who is on the list Newsletter, who placed an order in the last 90 days, minus anyone who is on the list Wholesale.

The rule reads who is on the list now, every time it runs. Add somebody today and they are in it today; take them off and they are out. Deleting the list is the one thing that changes the rule's meaning rather than its members — every rule naming a deleted list stops matching anybody, and every is not on rule starts matching everybody — which is why a list cannot be deleted out from under a campaign that is armed and waiting to send.

And it remains true here that the list does not decide who may be emailed. Consent does, at send time, for every person.

The two numbers

Every list carries a pair, and they never appear apart:

2,140 people
1,830 eligible for marketing as of 2:14 PM

People is everyone currently on the list, whatever their consent. A person you can never email is still a person on your list.

Eligible for marketing is how many of them could be reached — they have an address, they said yes, their identity is confirmed, and they are not paused. It is the best count available at the moment it was taken, which is why the clock time rides with it every time it is shown. It is never a promise about a send.

The real check happens at send time, every time, for every person. Consent can change in the minutes after a count. So can a pause. And a small number of addresses are blocked permanently in a way no count can see, which is the one place this number can be generous. A later refusal is normal and shows up in the campaign's own record; the gap is shown rather than hidden.

One list's page

Open a list to see who is on it and what you can do to it.

Who is on this list — the pair above, counted when you arrive. The refresh mark at the top of the page counts again. If another count is already running for your store, or the list takes too long to count, the card says so plainly and keeps the last numbers it honestly had; the list itself is unaffected.

People on this list — Name, Email, Consent, and Added, which carries both the day somebody joined and how they came to be there — from a segment, say. Show narrows to just those eligible for marketing, and Show more pages through the rest. What you see is a page of a live list, not a manifest of a send.

Search narrows the people on the list by name or email. Type part of a first name, part of a surname, both with the space between, or any part of an address. Type more than one word and every one of them has to match, wherever each falls, so Jeremy @example.com finds the Jeremy at that domain and the order does not matter. It searches only this list, and it works alongside Show, so you can look at just the eligible people whose name contains Jeremy. Searching for a % finds a % — nothing you type is treated as a wildcard.

Remove takes one person off, after the confirmation above.

The marks at the top of the page

Three marks sit beside the list's name: refresh, import and export. Hover over one and it says what it is. Beside them is a ⋮ button, and it holds the same three as words, plus Delete — so nothing is reachable only by recognizing a symbol, and the one act you cannot undo is not a slip away from the others.

Changing the name

Press the name itself and type. Enter or clicking away saves it; Escape puts the old name back. If you already have a list with that name, the page says so beside it and the old name stands. It is the same way you rename a template or a form.

Deleting a list

Delete asks first, and what it says is the part that matters: only the list is deleted. Everybody on it stays in your store, nobody is unsubscribed, and nobody comes off any other list. The list disappears from your lists and can no longer be chosen anywhere; the record of who was on it is kept.

Deleting is refused while a campaign that is armed and waiting to send has an audience naming this list; you will be told which campaigns, and canceling or unscheduling them frees the list. Switch Show to Archived to find a deleted list again, and Restore brings it back. An archived list is read-only until you do: nothing can be added to it, its name cannot be changed, and it cannot be chosen anywhere.

Details shows when the list was created and its description.

A person's own record

A profile carries a Lists block: the lists they are on now, with the day they joined and how they came to be there, and below that, Taken off — the ones they have come off, with the day.

Add to a list puts this one person on a list you choose, without going through a segment. It is the counterpart to Remove on a list's own page, and it changes nothing else about them: nobody is emailed, and their consent stays exactly as it was. If they are already on the list you pick, the app says so and nothing happens twice.

Removing somebody is recorded, not erased. That history is how "why did they get that email?" gets answered months later, and it is the reason nothing here quietly deletes a membership.