Address book permissions: restrict who can send to specific contacts

Learn how to restrict users from sending to specific contacts and why you might want to do it.

Overview

You can restrict users from sending any email campaigns to specific contacts using the address book permissions.

Restrict sending to any contacts

You can restrict a user from sending to any of your contacts with the Contacts user permission. To learn more, check out the article Restrict and grant user access permissions.

Before you start

Things you need to know:

• You must be either an Account owner or a user with the Can manage account permission.
  

  To learn more, check out the article Restrict and grant user access permissions.

Use case - VIP contacts

Address book permissions are useful if you want to limit who can send to a group of contacts.

ACME is a B2B brand that maintains a list of high-value customers. They keep these customers in an address book called VIPs.

ACME only wants the VIPs to receive certain communications sent specifically from their Marketing Director. Since the Marketing Director is also the account owner, they can set the send permission on the VIP address book to include only themselves.

Suppose another user tries to send an email campaign to any contact in the VIP address book. In that case, we'll remove the VIP contacts before sending, and the VIP contacts won't receive the campaign.

You cannot set address book permissions on SMS address books.

How restricting works

By default, all users with the Sender permission can send to your address books. However, when an address book has permissions assigned, only the chosen users can send to the contacts it contains. Other users can't send to these contacts, even if they appear in other address books, segments, or marketing preferences that they can send to.

Let's say we have the setup below:

 Here are some user configurations and who they can send to:

User	Can send to
Account owner or managed users with the Can manage account permission	All address books (this cannot be restricted)
User with sending permission for Address book A	Contacts in address book A Contacts exclusively in address book D
User with sending permission for Address book B	Contacts exclusively in address book B Contacts exclusively in address book D
User with no specific address book sending permissions	Contacts exclusively in address book D

Create a new address book with sending permissions

To set up address book permissions when creating a new address book:

1. Go to Email > Contacts > All contacts > New address book.
2. Enter a name, folder, and description.
3. For Users allowed to send to this address book, select Select users.
   

   You only see this option if you are the account owner or a user with the Can manage account permission.

4. On the Select users panel, select the users you want to permit to send email campaigns to the address book or remove any users who shouldn’t have permission.
   
5. Select Save.

Add sending permissions to an existing address book

To set address book permissions on an existing address book:

1. Go to Email > Contacts.
2. For the address book you want to add permissions to, select Properties.
3. Select Select users.
   

   You only see this option if you are the account owner or a user with the Can manage account permission.

4. On the Select users panel, select the users you want to permit to send email campaigns to the address book or remove any users who shouldn’t have permission.
5. Select Save.

How address book permissions affect your email reports

If you have implemented address book sending permissions, you might see Excluded contacts begin to appear on your email reports, in the Campaign details section.

This happens when a user sends a campaign to a group of contacts (address books and/or segments) which contains contacts who are part of an address book that the user in question does not have permission to send to. The restriction applies even when the user is sending to different address books or segments which contain the restricted contacts.

Resending to excluded contacts

If you want to resend a campaign to the excluded contacts, you can create a segment to identify them, and then either

• a user with permission to send to the restricted contacts can resend the campaign
  or
• you can remove the restrictions from your address books and any user with sending permissions can resend the campaign.

To create the segment, you need to identify contacts who are present in the address books or segments initially sent to, but who did not receive the campaign.