Audiences, groups, tags, and segments
Four words do the organizing here. From the outside in:
An audience is one publication—one pen name, one newsletter. It owns its readers, forms, campaigns, sending domain, and (importantly) its own suppression list. If you write under two names, that's two audiences: a reader unsubscribing from one hasn't unsubscribed from the other.
Groups are lists you place readers into explicitly—"ARC team", "Street team", "Imported from MailerLite". A reader can be in many groups.
Tags are labels that accumulate on a reader—"BookFunnel", "giveaway-2026", "clicked-preorder". Tags are also what automations react to: a sequence can fire the moment a tag is added.
Segments are saved searches—rules like "active, tagged BookFunnel, joined in the last 90 days" that are re-evaluated live every time they're used. A segment updates itself; a group only changes when someone changes it.
Which do I use?
- Membership someone chose or you assigned → group
- A fact about the reader worth remembering → tag
- "Everyone who currently matches these rules" for sending → segment
Finding who is not in a group
Both filters on the Contacts page run backwards as well as forwards. The group menu offers Not in any group (readers no group has ever claimed) and a Is NOT in list for excluding one particular group; the tag menu offers Not tagged at all and Does not have tag.
The everyday use: you make a new group—say "Weekly newsletter"—and want everyone who isn't sorted yet in it. Filter to Not in any group, tick the checkbox at the top of the list, choose Select all N matching, then pick the group under Add to group. Contacts who unsubscribed or bounced aren't in that view to begin with (see below), so they can't be swept in.
Bulk adds are quiet on purpose: filing thousands of existing readers into a group never starts a sequence, however that group is used. Enrolling a segment on the sequence is the deliberate way to start one.
Segment rules speak the same language—is in no group at all, has no tags at all, plus "is not in" and "does not have" for a named one—so anything you can filter to, you can save and send to.
Your list, and everyone else
The Contacts page opens on Your list: the contacts you can send to today. Everyone else sits in one quiet Inactive tab beside it—people who unsubscribed, addresses that bounced, anyone who complained, and signups who never clicked the confirmation link. The test is simply whether the next campaign could reach them.
Open Inactive and it breaks down by reason—unconfirmed, unsubscribed, bounced, cleaned, complained—plus everyone for one undivided list.
Unconfirmed is the one you can do something about: they signed up but never clicked the confirmation link, so nothing can reach them. Open the contact and you'll find Resend confirmation email—once per contact, and only once. If they don't click it the second time either, that is an answer, and chasing it further is how a sender earns spam complaints.
That split matters most right after a migration. It's normal for an imported list to carry more inactive contacts than live ones, and a headline count that's mostly people who left tells you nothing true about the size of your audience. Nothing is hidden—only unmixed.
If you search for a reader on Your list and they aren't there, the page tells you how many match among the inactive and offers to search everyone instead—so looking someone up never dead-ends just because they left.
Because the default view is your live list, bulk actions and the Export CSV button follow it: select-all-matching can't reach into the unsubscribed by accident.