One clean, organised home for every contact
Import from anywhere, keep your list healthy and reach exactly the right people with live segments.
What contacts & segments in MailNesto does
Audience is everything MailNesto knows about the people you email, kept in one place: contacts with their custom fields, the lists and tags they belong to, segments that sort them by behaviour, a lead score, and predictions about who is likely to buy, when they will order next and how much they may spend. Campaigns, automations, forms and reports all read from it, so a change here shows up everywhere.
For most small businesses, contact data starts scattered — a billing export, a front-desk Google Sheet, Shopify customers, Instagram lead forms. The first job is to bring it together without duplicates; the second is to make it useful. Knowing that, say, 640 people in Pune ordered in the last 90 days is what turns a list into a plan.
It stays accurate without constant tidying: segments update themselves, scores rise and fade with activity, and predictions refresh every night.
Contacts & segments, done properly
Import from anywhere
CSV and Excel uploads, scheduled imports from a URL or database, Shopify and WooCommerce history, Zapier and the API.
Live segments
Combine behaviour, fields, tags, purchases, location and engagement. Segments update themselves as people change.
Describe who you want
Type “people in Hyderabad who clicked last month” and the AI builds the segment for you.
A full profile per contact
Every email, open, click, order, form, page visit and automation — on one timeline.
Predictions
Likely buyers, unsubscribe risk, each customer’s next order date and predicted spend, and each person’s best time to receive email — learned from your own data.
Stay compliant
Consent history, suppression lists, data requests and one-click unsubscribes keep you on the right side of the law.
Bring contacts in from anywhere, without duplicates
Upload a CSV or Excel workbook (.xlsx), or paste rows in. Map columns to fields, choose a list, add up to ten tags and decide whether existing contacts are updated. The result shows how many were created, updated, unchanged, invalid or repeated within the file.
For data that changes, schedule an import from a CSV or JSON address, or a read-only Postgres or MySQL query, hourly, daily or weekly. Contacts also arrive from Shopify and WooCommerce history, the API, Zapier, Make, Pabbly Connect, Google Sheets, Facebook Lead Ads and incoming webhooks.
The duplicate finder looks for the same mailbox written differently — asha.rao+events@gmail.com and asharao@gmail.com — the same mobile number or the same full name. Merging moves all history onto the record you keep; pairs that are really two people can be marked as such.
- CSV, Excel (.xlsx) or paste, with column mapping
- Scheduled imports from a URL or a database
- Store history from Shopify and WooCommerce
- See which automations an import will start before you run it
- Duplicate finder for Gmail dots, plus-tags, phone numbers and names
A full history for every contact
Open a contact and you see their story on one timeline: when they were added and from where, each email received, opened and clicked, forms filled, surveys answered, website pages visited, orders placed with the campaign that earned them, automations entered and left, transactional emails, consent changes and merges.
Beside it are their lists, tags and fields, 90-day open and click rates, the device and email app they use most, and their engagement level: engaged (opened or clicked in 30 days), at risk (31–90), inactive, or new. A support agent can see at a glance that this customer opened last week’s sale email and ordered from it.
- Emails, forms, visits, orders and automations on one timeline
- Engagement level from a simple 30/90-day rule
- Total orders and revenue per contact
- One-click data export per contact
Segments that keep themselves up to date
A segment is a saved set of rules whose members change as people do. Rules can check status, source, tags, lists, sign-up date, custom fields, opens and clicks within so many days, a specific campaign, website pages and events, orders and spend, lead score and predictions.
Combine rules with “all” or “any”, nest groups up to three levels and flip any rule with “not”. The count updates as you build, and you can see who matches before saving.
Use segments as a campaign audience, to exclude people, to narrow a list (“Newsletter, only Maharashtra”), or to start an automation. Or describe the group in a sentence and the AI assistant drafts the rules.
- Engagement, purchase, website, score and prediction rules
- Nested groups with all/any and “not”
- Live count and a preview of who matches
- Exclude segments from any campaign
- Entering a segment can start an automation
Lead scoring that shows who is ready
Switch on lead scoring and each contact earns points for what they do. The starting rules give 1 for an open (up to 3 a day), 3 for a click, 2 for a visit, 10 for a form, 15 for an event registration and 25 for an order, and take off 10 for a hard bounce and 50 for a complaint. Change any of them, add points for tags, or count only visits to pages such as pricing.
Scores look back over 30 to 365 days, so old activity fades, and contacts are cold, warm or hot by thresholds you set.
A score is only useful if someone acts on it. “Lead score reaches” starts an automation: alert the team, send a personal note from a salesperson, open a deal with a call task, or mark the contact as sales-ready. If you use HubSpot or Zoho CRM, scores are sent there too.
- Points for opens, clicks, visits, forms, events and orders
- Negative points for bounces and complaints
- Points for tags you choose
- Hot, warm and cold levels in segments
- Scores shared with HubSpot and Zoho CRM
Predictions learned from your own data
Every night MailNesto estimates who is likely to buy and who is likely to unsubscribe in the next 30 days, using a model trained on your own account’s history once there is enough of it, and simple rules before that. Each card lists the main reasons in plain words, plus the hour and weekday the person usually opens.
Shopper predictions come from orders. A customer’s usual gap between orders gives their next order date (one-time buyers get your store’s typical gap), and average order value, frequency and recent activity give predicted spend for the next 12 months. The top 10% are marked top value.
Predictions are rules like any other: a segment of “likely to buy and top value” for an early-access sale, “next order due within 7 days” for a reminder, or “likely to unsubscribe” to send fewer, better emails. The “next order is due” automation trigger uses the same dates.
- Likely to buy and likely to unsubscribe in the next 30 days
- Best hour and weekday for each person
- Next order date, and customers who are overdue
- Predicted 12-month spend
- Repeat buyers told apart from one-time buyers
Up and running in three steps
- 1
Bring your contacts
Upload a file or connect your store — duplicates and bad addresses are cleaned.
- 2
Organise
Lists, tags and 22 types of custom fields.
- 3
Target
Build segments and use them in campaigns and automations.
Contacts & segments for every kind of business
A skincare brand in Chennai imports its Shopify history and sends its Diwali preview only to “top value” customers.
An institute in Hyderabad keeps one list per course and tags each student’s target exam. A nightly scheduled import from its admissions database keeps fee status and batch up to date in custom fields.
A physiotherapy clinic in Pune imports patients from its billing software as an Excel file, merges records created twice by different receptionists, and builds a segment of patients with a birthday this month.
A restaurant group in Delhi segments diners by outlet city and by “opened in the last 30 days”, so each new-menu email goes first to engaged regulars near that outlet.
An HR software company in Gurugram scores pricing-page visits, webinar registrations and demo forms. When a lead reaches 50, an automation opens a deal and the score is sent on to Zoho CRM.
An agency onboarding a client runs the duplicate finder and list verification before the first send.
- Unlimited lists and tags
- Custom fields (text, dates, birthdays, addresses, ratings…)
- Duplicate finder and merge
- List verification
- Bulk actions
- Scheduled imports
- Engagement scoring
- Birthday and date segments
- Suppression lists
- Contact export
- Audience growth reports
- Data requests (access, delete)
In many tools, contacts are spread across separate lists that each behave like a different audience, segments only look at fields and opens, and anything predictive needs a data team or a paid add-on. Excel files usually have to be saved as CSV first, and cleaning duplicates is a spreadsheet job.
MailNesto keeps one record per person however many lists they join. Segments can mix behaviour, orders, website visits, lead score and predictions in nested rules; imports take Excel directly and can run on a schedule from your database; and the same person written two ways, such as a Gmail address with dots or a plus-tag, is found for you. Predictions are learned from your own account and used like any other rule.
Tips for better results
- 1
Use lists for what people chose to receive and tags for what you know about them. Subscribers can see lists in the preference centre; tags are your private notes.
- 2
Map phone numbers and cities on import even if you do not need them yet — the duplicate finder and city segments will use them later.
- 3
Keep an “opened or clicked in the last 90 days” segment and send your most frequent emails to it, with less frequent emails to everyone else.
- 4
Set lead score thresholds after a month of data: look at the scores of people who bought or booked a demo and set “hot” just below them.
- 5
Give predictions a few months of orders before relying on them; until a store has enough repeat customers, next-order dates fall back on a typical gap.
- 6
Write tags in lower case with hyphens. Tags are stored in lower case anyway, and consistent names make segments easier to build.
- 7
Suppress whole domains you must never email, such as your own staff domain, rather than adding addresses one by one.
Questions about contacts & segments
What happens to duplicates when I import?
Emails are matched case-insensitively; existing contacts are updated rather than duplicated, and invalid addresses are reported.
Can I import from my database automatically?
Yes — schedule an import from a CSV/JSON URL or a read-only Postgres/MySQL query, hourly or daily.
What is the difference between a list and a segment?
A list is something people join, by signing up or being added. A segment is a set of rules, and its members change on their own as contacts’ details and behaviour change. Campaigns can go to lists, segments or both.
Can I import contacts from Google Sheets?
Yes. New rows can be sent in as contacts as they are added, including Google Form answers, or a whole sheet can be imported on a schedule.
Will merging two contacts lose any history?
No. Empty fields are filled from the other record, tags and lists are combined, and every email, open, click, order, visit, survey answer and automation run moves to the contact you keep.
How often are predictions updated?
Every night. Lead scores update every minute as new activity comes in, and segments are worked out fresh each time they are used.
Do I need a store connected to use predictions?
Not for all of them. Likely to buy, likely to unsubscribe and best send time come from email activity. Next order date and predicted spend need orders, from a connected store, Razorpay or the Orders API.
Can I delete a contact’s data when they ask?
Yes. Delete the contact from their profile, or handle requests made through the preference centre from your privacy queue, which tracks each request against a 30-day deadline.