# Lists

> Subscription lists contacts opt into and broadcasts target — creating them, getting people onto them, and when to use a list instead of a tag or a segment.

Source: https://knowledge.estage.com/crm/lists/
Part of the ESTAGE knowledge base (https://knowledge.estage.com). Full corpus: https://knowledge.estage.com/llms-full.txt

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A **list** is a group of contacts who opted into a particular kind of email: your newsletter,
product updates, a course cohort. Broadcasts target them directly, and automations can add and
remove people from them.

Find them under **Lists** in the sidebar.

## Managing lists

- **New list** — give it a name: `Newsletter`, `Customers`, `Waitlist`.
- **Pencil icon** — rename it. Memberships are unaffected.
- **Trash icon** — delete it. **Contacts are kept**; only the list goes.
- **Actions** — tick several rows to delete them together.

Each row shows the list's name, its **subscriber count** and when it was created. Sort by name,
most subscribers, or newest/oldest.

Click a list and you land in [Contacts](/crm/contacts/) filtered to its subscribers — the same
view you'd get by adding a **List** filter yourself, with the full set of bulk actions available.

## Getting contacts onto a list

Four routes, all of them ordinary:

| Where | How |
| --- | --- |
| **New contact** | Pick lists in the create dialog |
| **CSV import** | Choose "add to lists" during [import](/crm/contacts/#from-a-csv) |
| **Contacts → Actions** | **Add to list** (keeps other memberships) or **Move to list** (swaps one for another) |
| **Automations** | The *Add to list* and *Remove from list* [steps](/email/automations/) |

## Tags, lists and segments

Three ways to group contacts, and mixing them up makes a mess later. The difference is who
decides membership:

| | Who decides | Changes when | Good for |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **List** | The contact — they opted into it | Someone subscribes or unsubscribes | What people asked to receive |
| **Tag** | You | You add or remove it, by hand or via an automation | Facts you record — `vip`, `attended-webinar` |
| **[Segment](/crm/contacts/#saved-segments)** | A rule | Automatically, every time it runs | Questions you keep asking — "customers who went quiet" |

A practical split: **lists** are the subscriptions you'd let someone manage themselves, **tags**
are what you know about them, and **segments** are the queries you run across both.

If you find yourself hand-maintaining a list that could be described as a rule, it should
probably be a segment.

## Lists and suppression

A [suppressed](/crm/suppressions/) contact stays on every list they're on — they simply stop
receiving mail. Removing someone from a list is not the same as suppressing them, and neither one
deletes the contact.