Mailing lists and your audience

A mailing list is the container that holds your contacts. MailCamp is moving to a single audience per account: one place where every contact lives, divided up with segments, tags and topics instead of with separate lists. Extra lists are still available on enterprise plans, for the rare case where audiences really must stay apart.

Every contact in MailCamp belongs to a mailing list. The list decides which custom fields exist, which topics people can subscribe to, which sender details campaigns go out with, and which language is used as a fallback for imports and forms. In the interface you will mostly see this called your audience.

One audience instead of many lists

MailCamp used to encourage a new list for every purpose: one for the newsletter, one for customers, one per event. In practice that works against you. The same person ends up stored several times, so you pay for them more than once and they can receive the same campaign twice. An unsubscribe only applies to the list it happened on, which is a compliance risk. And open and click figures are split across lists, so no report shows the full picture.

So the model has been turned around. Your account has one audience that holds everyone, and the differences between people are described on the contact itself. That keeps one contact record per person, one unsubscribe that is respected everywhere, and one set of statistics.

What replaces a second list

• Segments — a saved filter over your audience, for example everyone in Belgium who clicked in the last 30 days. Membership is recalculated on every send, so it is never out of date.
• Tags — labels you assign yourself, such as customer, partner or trade-fair-2026. Perfect for the kind of grouping a separate list used to be created for.
• Topics — subscription preferences that contacts choose themselves, on your forms or in the preference centre. Someone who only wants product news simply switches the other topics off.

Each of these can be picked as the recipients of a campaign, exactly like a list could. The difference is that the contact stays one record.

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Extra lists are the exception now

Creating additional mailing lists is no longer part of the standard way of working. It stays available on enterprise plans and by arrangement, for situations where audiences genuinely may not touch — a separate legal entity, a second brand with its own sender identity, or a market that must be administered apart. If that is not your situation, one audience with segments, tags and topics will serve you better.

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Nothing is taken away from you

Lists you already have keep working exactly as before. Their contacts, forms, segments, campaigns and statistics are untouched, and you can keep sending to them. The change is about which way is recommended for new work, not about removing what exists.

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Things stay inside one list

Custom fields, topics, segments and subscribe forms all belong to the list they were made in, and a campaign sends to one list at a time. Spreading contacts over several lists therefore means maintaining the same fields, topics and forms several times — a good reason to keep everything in one audience.

Why can I not create a new list?

Your plan has a limit on the number of mailing lists, and you have reached it — the "New list" button is then hidden. On accounts that run on a single audience there is no button at all, because everything already goes to that one audience. If you have a case that really needs a separate list, talk to us about it.

I already have several lists — do I have to merge them?

You do not have to do anything. If you would like to consolidate, the usual route is to export the smaller lists and import them into the audience you want to keep, giving each import a tag so you can tell the groups apart afterwards. Duplicate email addresses are merged into one contact during the import.

Does an unsubscribe apply to all my lists?

No — an unsubscribe applies to the list it happened on. Someone who unsubscribes from your newsletter list can therefore still be active on another list and keep receiving mail from you, which is exactly the kind of surprise a single audience prevents.

Do contacts on two lists count twice?

Yes. Each list stores its own contact record, so the same email address on three lists is three contacts for your plan's contact count. Consolidating into one audience usually lowers that number.

How do I send to one part of my audience?

Build a segment and select it as the recipients in the campaign wizard, or send to a tag or a topic. That is the direct replacement for picking a separate list.

See also

• Audience settings
• What are segments
• Tags
• Topics (interest preferences)
• Importing contacts