Manage Contacts

Effectively manage your contact database, handle bounces, and maintain email deliverability

Properly managing your contacts is essential for maintaining good deliverability, ensuring compliance, and maximizing the effectiveness of your email marketing. This guide covers how to handle bounces, manage suppression lists, and maintain contact data in Brew.

For proactive strategies to keep your audience clean and engaged over time, see our Audience Hygiene guide.

Contact Activity Timeline

The contact activity timeline provides a chronological view of all interactions and events for a specific contact. This powerful feature helps you understand each contact’s journey and engagement with your emails.

To access the contact activity timeline:

1. Go to the Audience page
2. Click on any contact’s email address
3. View the complete history in the Activity section

What’s Tracked in the Timeline

The timeline displays a comprehensive record of contact activity:

Email engagement events

• Sent: When an email was delivered to the contact
• Opened: When the contact opened an email
• Clicked: When the contact clicked a link in an email
• Hard bounced: When an email permanently failed to deliver
• Soft bounced: When an email temporarily failed to deliver
• Marked as spam: When the contact reported an email as spam
• Unsubscribed: When the contact opted out of communications

Audience events

• Added to audience: When the contact was first added to your Brew audience
• Added to subscription group: When the contact joined a specific subscription group
• Removed from subscription group: When the contact left a subscription group
• Property updated: When any contact property was changed

Custom events

• Any custom events you track via the API
• Actions taken in your product or website that you’ve configured to send to Brew

The timeline makes it easy to see the full context of a contact’s interactions with your business, helping you provide more personalized communication and troubleshoot any issues.

Understanding Contact Properties

Every contact in Brew has properties that store information about them. These properties can be used for personalization in your emails and for segmenting your audience.

Default Contact Properties

These are the default properties for every contact on Brew. They cannot be deleted.

Contact Property	Example	Dynamic Content Tag	API Name
Created at	Oct 10, 2025, 3:02:06 PM	{createdAt}	created_at
Updated at	Oct 10, 2025, 3:02:06 PM	{updatedAt}	updated_at
Email	[e-mail]	{email}	email
First name	Philip	{firstName}	first_name
Last name	Sørensen	{lastName}	last_name
Source	CSV	{source}	source
Subscription Groups	Newsletter, Product Updates	{subscriptionGroups}	subscription_groups
Subscribed	Unsubscribed	N/A	subscribed

Custom Properties

In addition to default properties, you can create custom properties to store additional information about your contacts. These can include:

• Demographics (location, industry, etc.)
• Preferences (communication preferences, interests)
• Account information (plan type, subscription status)
• Behavioral data (purchase history, feature usage)

Custom properties are powerful for segmenting your audience and personalizing your emails.

Reserved Field Names: The following field names are reserved and cannot be used for custom properties: created_at, updated_at, email, first_name, last_name, source, subscription_groups, and subscribed. Use descriptive alternatives like companyEmail or workEmail if you need similar fields.

To add a custom property to your audience:

1. Go to the Audience page
2. Click on the Contact Properties icon - the rightmost icon in the audience table
3. Select “Add new property” from the dropdown menu
4. In the modal that appears, enter a clear and descriptive name for your property
5. Select the property type
6. Click “Save Property” to create the property

Viewing Contact Properties

You can see all your contact properties on the API page in Settings.

Property Types

Brew supports four types of custom properties:

String

Text-based information (names, descriptions, categories, etc.)

Supported format: Any text value

Examples: “Enterprise”, “New York”, “Referred by Jane”

Number

Numeric values (counts, amounts, measurements, etc.)

Supported format: Integers and decimals

Examples: 42, 99.95, 2500, -15, 3.14159

Boolean

True/false values

Supported formats:

• true/false
• yes/no
• 1/0

Examples: true, no, 1

Date

When sending dates through CSV uploads, forms, or the API, you can use either a Unix timestamp or a readable date string — whichever feels easier.

Unix timestamps can be sent in seconds or milliseconds, as either numbers or strings:

• 1704067200 (seconds)
• 1704067200000 (milliseconds)

Readable date strings are also supported and can include both the date and time, or just the date.

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.sss
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.sss
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM
YYYY-MM-DD

If you only include the date (like 2025-01-05), Brew treats it as midnight (00:00:00 UTC) for that day.

Other accepted formats:

• YYYY-M-D
• YYYY/MM/DD
• YYYY/M/D
• MM/DD/YY
• M/D/YY
• M-D-YY
• M-D-YYYY

Formats like MM/DD/YY and M/D/YY are read as month / day / year (US style).
To avoid confusion, we recommend using YYYY-MM-DD whenever possible.

Time zones
You can add a timezone offset to any time — +02:00, -07:00, or Z (for UTC).
If you leave it out, Brew assumes it’s UTC by default.

You might notice a few hours’ difference when viewing times in the app — that’s because Brew stores everything in UTC, but your browser displays it in your local time zone.

Precision
Brew supports times to the second, and will also accept and store milliseconds (.sss) if you include them.

Understanding Email Bounces

An email bounce occurs when your message cannot be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. Bounces are important signals about your contact data quality and can affect your sender reputation if not properly managed.

Brew automatically handles bounce management to protect your sender reputation, but understanding the different types can help you maintain a healthier audience.

Types of Bounces

Brew categorizes bounces into two main types:

Hard Bounces

Permanent delivery failures that won’t be resolved with retries

Soft Bounces

Temporary delivery issues that may resolve over time

Hard Bounces

Hard bounces indicate permanent delivery failures that won’t be resolved with additional sending attempts.

Common causes of hard bounces:

• Email address contains a typo (e.g., [e-mail])
• Email address doesn’t exist (perhaps the person left the company)
• Email server has permanently blocked delivery
• Domain no longer exists

How Brew handles hard bounces:

1. Automatically identifies the bounce based on server response codes
2. Records the specific bounce reason in your campaign analytics
3. Adds the email address to your suppression list
4. Prevents future sending attempts to protect your deliverability

A hard bounce rate above 0.3% (30 bounces per 1,000 emails) can trigger temporary sending restrictions to protect your sender reputation.

Soft Bounces

Soft bounces are temporary delivery failures that may resolve with time or additional attempts.

Common causes of soft bounces:

• Recipient’s mailbox is full
• Email server is temporarily down or unavailable
• Message is too large
• Recipient’s auto-responder is active

How Brew handles soft bounces:

1. Automatically retries delivery based on industry best practices
2. Tracks the bounce reason and attempts in your analytics
3. Only counts unique soft bounces in your metrics (not each retry)
4. Converts to a hard bounce after multiple failed attempts (typically 3-5 days of trying)

Soft bounces typically resolve on their own and don’t require immediate action. However, persistently high soft bounce rates (above 5%) may indicate underlying issues with your sending practices.

Contact Management Tasks

This section covers common operational tasks for managing your contacts database.

Updating Contact Properties

To update properties for individual contacts:

1. Go to the Audience page
2. Click on the contact you want to modify
3. Make your desired changes
4. Click “Save” to update the property

Deleting Contacts

To permanently remove contacts from your database:

1. Go to the Audience page
2. Create and save the contacts you want to delete as a new audience
3. Click the “More” (⋮) menu at the top of the table
4. Select “Delete contact”
5. Confirm the deletion

Contact deletion is permanent and cannot be undone. Deleted contacts will be removed from all subscription groups and automations. This action is different from unsubscribing or suppressing contacts.

Programmatic Contact Management

For programmatic contact management, you can use the Brew API to create, update, and delete contacts directly from your application.

View API documentation

Explore the complete API reference with all endpoints, authentication, and code examples

Learn about Audience Hygiene

Discover strategic approaches for maintaining a clean, engaged email list

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