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List permissions: restrict who can send to specific contacts
List permissions: restrict who can send to specific contacts

Limit who can send to a group of contacts such as your VIP list.

Gareth Burroughes avatar
Written by Gareth Burroughes
Updated over a week ago

List 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 a list 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 list to include only themselves.

Suppose another user tries to send a campaign to any contact in the VIP list. In that case, we remove the VIP contacts before sending, and the VIP contacts won't receive the campaign.

Restrict sending to any contacts

You can restrict a user from sending to any of your contacts with the Contacts user permission.

How restricting works

By default, all users with the Sender permission can send to your lists. However, when a list 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 lists, 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 lists (this cannot be restricted)

User with sending permission for List A

  • Contacts in list A

  • Contacts exclusively in list D

User with sending permission for List B

  • Contacts exclusively in list B

  • Contacts exclusively in list D

User with no specific list sending permissions

  • Contacts exclusively in list D

Create a new list with sending permissions

  1. Go to Audience > Lists > NEW LIST.

  2. Enter a name, add to a folder, and enter a description.

  3. For Who can send to this list, select CHOOSE USERS.
    You only see this option if you are the account owner or a user with the Can manage account permission.

  4. On the side panel, select the users you want to permit to send campaigns to the list or remove any users who shouldn’t have permission.

  5. Select Save.

Add sending permissions to an existing list

  1. Go to Audience > Lists.

  2. For the list you want to add permissions to, select Properties.

  3. For Permitted senders, 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 side panel, select the users you want to permit to send campaigns to the list or remove any users who shouldn’t have permission.

  5. Select Save.

How list permissions affect your email reports

If you have implemented list 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 (lists, segments, or marketing preference groups) which contains contacts who are part of a list that the user in question does not have permission to send to. The restriction applies even when the user is sending to different lists 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 lists and any user with sending permissions can resend the campaign.

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

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