Contacts

Your contacts are the people you message. Everything else — campaigns, the inbox, follow-ups — points back to this list. This guide covers how to get people in, keep them organised, and enrich them with your own data.

Adding a single contact

Go to Contacts → Add contact. The essential field is the phone number in full international format (country code included, no + needed but no leading zeros). Name fields are optional but make the inbox far more usable.

A contact needs a valid WhatsApp-capable number to be messageable. Lynkist stores the number as you enter it; malformed numbers will fail at send time, not at save time.

Importing in bulk

Most teams start with an existing list. Go to Contacts → Import & Export.

1. Click Import Contacts and upload a CSV or Excel file.
2. Map your file's columns to Lynkist fields (phone, first name, last name, and any custom fields you've created).
3. Review the preview and confirm.

Exporting

The same page has Export Contacts — download your full list in CSV or Excel at any time. Use this for backups, for syncing into another tool, or before a large clean-up.

Groups — segment your audience

Contacts → Groups lets you bucket contacts into named Contact Groups (for example "Newsletter", "VIP customers", "Trial signups"). Each group has a name and an optional description.

Groups are how you target a campaign without sending to everyone. When you build a campaign you pick one or more groups as the audience. A contact can belong to many groups at once.

Sources — track where contacts came from

Contacts → Sources lets you tag each contact with a Contact Source — where they entered your world (website form, walk-in, referral, an ad, an import). Sources are useful for reporting ("which channel brings the best customers?") and for filtering your list.

Custom fields — store your own data

Out of the box a contact has name and phone. Contacts → Custom Fields lets you add your own attributes so contacts carry the data your business actually cares about.

When you create a custom field you set:

• Field name — the internal key used in imports and the API (e.g. loyalty_tier).
• Display label — the human-friendly label shown in the UI.
• Field type — text, number, date, dropdown, and so on.
• Dropdown options — if the type is Dropdown, you define the allowed choices.
• Required — whether the field must be filled in.

Custom fields show up in the contact detail view, in import column mapping, and — importantly — as template variables, so you can personalise messages with them.

Follow-ups — never drop a lead

Contacts → Follow-ups is a lightweight reminder system tied to a contact. Create a follow-up with:

• The contact it's about
• A date & time
• A category (e.g. General or Meeting)

Follow-ups give your team a simple "come back to this person" queue, separate from live inbox conversations — ideal for sales pipelines and scheduled check-ins.

A sensible order to set this up

1. Create your custom fields first, so imported data has somewhere to land.
2. Create your sources and groups so you can classify on the way in.
3. Import your list, mapping to the fields you just created.
4. Use follow-ups as you work the list day to day.

Next steps