☰Contacts

For everyone you are in contact with. Calls, mails and campaigns start from here — the list is not just a filing place but the starting point for almost every action in Aurora Hive Sales.

Clicking a row opens that person’s history: notes, mails, calls, tasks and follow-ups in one place.

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Via “+ New” at the top of the list — intended for the contact you just had on the phone.

Little is mandatory, but two fields determine what will be possible later:

• Email address. Without it, this contact cannot be written to in any campaign.
• Salutation. Used for the personal address in mails. If it is missing, the neutral form from the template is used — and recipients notice.

Larger numbers are more conveniently brought in via the data import.

The most important ones, with their effect:

• Salutation — personal address in mails.
• First name, last name — placeholders in templates.
• Email — prerequisite for every campaign.
• Phone — if telephony is set up, you can call directly from here.
• Company — links the contact to their company; through it you see all contact people in one place.
• Street, postcode, town — for letters and the location map in the reports.
• Category and tags — later determine the audience of a campaign.
• Note — free text for anything that does not fit into a field of its own. Only visible internally.

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The search field above the list searches name, company and email address at the same time. Part of a word is enough.

Important: the search covers the entire data set, not just the rows currently displayed. So if you do not find anything, it is not because of the page number.

Both classify contacts, but in different ways:

• The category is the broad role in the business — customer, prospect, supplier. It answers the question: what is this person to us?
• A tag is anything else that may apply: industry, trade fair, origin of the address. Several per contact.

For sending, this is the decisive point: the audience of a campaign is put together from these properties. Ten minutes of tidiness here save manual work every week.

Via “Import contacts” directly above the list. The data import opens as a drawer — you do not leave the page.

Three steps: drag the file in, check, import. Aurora Hive Sales recognises the columns itself and works out beforehand what will happen.

During import, Aurora Hive Sales recognises existing contacts by their email address and adds to them, instead of creating them twice or overwriting them.

If two records for the same person have nonetheless been created — for example because the private address was used once and the business address once — they can be merged. Notes, history and assignments move along with them.

Via “Delete contact” in the detail view. Aurora Hive Sales asks for the reason, and the answer decides more than you might think at first:

• Tidying up — duplicate, legacy data, typo. The contact disappears from your lists, but the address may come back: if it later turns up again in a file, in the opportunity search or on an opportunity, the same contact is restored together with its history, instead of a second one being created.
• At the person’s request — the address is also put on the blocklist and stays out.

The contact disappears from all lists and analyses together with its notes, tasks, follow-ups and mail history.

Think beforehand about whether deleting really is the right thing. Someone who just no longer wants to be written to is better served by an unsubscribe — then it remains traceable that this contact existed and why they no longer receive anything.

The contact list has its own filter for this. Anyone who has unsubscribed will never be written to again — Aurora Hive Sales checks this with every send, in every campaign.

An unsubscribe cannot be overridden by a new import: even a freshly imported contact with the same email address remains unsubscribed.

In the contact’s detail view. The complete history is shown there: notes, sent and received mails, calls, tasks and follow-ups — in chronological order.

That is the answer to the question that comes before every call: what did we last have to do with each other?

Yes, if a telephony profile has been set up for you. The phone number then becomes a button; the call runs in the browser.

Two prerequisites that usually cause the trouble: the page must run over a secure connection (https), and the browser must be allowed to access the microphone.

Via “📧 Send email” in the contact row or in the detail view. The same window opens that a campaign uses — with mailbox, stage, template, subject, text and attachments.

The difference from a campaign: exactly one mail goes out, immediately, and there is no follow-up. It still appears in the contact’s history.

With “🔁 Follow-up” in the contact’s detail view. You enter a date and optionally a reason.

On the due date, the follow-up appears on your Overview. That is the difference from a note: a note reminds nobody; a follow-up does.

The detail view has a notes field — free text for anything that does not fit into a field of its own. Only visible internally; the contact never sees any of it.

Everyone in the team sees what is written here. That is intended, and it is why the note is the right place for “prefers calls in the morning” and the wrong place for personal judgements.

Yes, as a CSV file. The output contains the fields of the list; which contacts end up in it depends on the filters set — what you see in the list is what you get in the file.

Remember that such an export carries personal data out of the system: it is subject to the same rules as the data in the system and does not belong unprotected in a mailbox.

For classification, yes: selecting several rows and setting the category or a tag together is the usual way to create order after an import.

For content fields — name, address, phone — there is deliberately no bulk change: a typo would spread across hundreds of records without anyone seeing it. Such corrections go through a new import, which shows beforehand what will happen.

No — it just cannot be reached by campaign. Calling, keeping notes, setting tasks and follow-ups, assigning it to a company: all of that works.

It does not appear in the number of recipients of a campaign. That is not an error, but the reason why the number of recipients is almost always smaller than the number of contacts in the category.

Via the Company field in the contact. This creates the link to the company file — there you will then see all contact people at the same company together.

A tip that saves a lot of trouble later: a different spelling creates a separate file. “Müller GmbH” and “Mueller GmbH” are two companies for Aurora Hive Sales. Agree on one spelling in the team before the first hundred contacts come in.

You should not be. When you open a contact, Aurora Hive Sales remembers where you were in the list and takes you back to the same place when you return.

If it does happen, it is almost always due to an old cached version of the page. Reloading with Ctrl+Shift+R fixes it.

The contact’s detail view shows everything stored about this person: master data, notes, the complete mail history, calls, tasks and follow-ups. Together with the CSV export, that is the basis for a response under Art. 15 GDPR.

Remember the second half of the response: where does the data come from? If the contact came in via an import, the evidence is in the Import history — it records who read in which file and when.

First check whether deletion really is required or whether an objection to advertising is meant — that is the more common case and is satisfied by the unsubscribe.

If deletion is requested and no retention obligations stand in the way (for example from an ongoing contract), there are two routes:

• “Delete contact” with the reason “At the person’s request”. The contact disappears from all lists, and the address goes on the blocklist — it cannot come back through any import or any research.
• Administration → Legal → Data protection erasure, if the records really are to disappear from the database. This route deletes the rows and sets the block.

The difference: deleting in the contact file hides the contact; the data protection erasure removes it. For a response to the person concerned, the second route is the cleaner one.

Record that you did this, and when — not in the deleted record, but in your own documentation. The Access log also records the operation.

That is a legal question, not a technical one, and Aurora Hive Sales cannot take it off your hands. The short version for business outreach in Germany:

• Existing customers may be written to about similar services if they were told about their right to object when the data was collected.
• Business outreach to new contacts is generally based on legitimate interest — this requires a recognisable factual connection to the recipient and a case-by-case assessment.
• Bought address lists with no connection are the case that regularly becomes expensive.
• Private individuals require consent.

What applies in every case: an unsubscribe link in every mail, unsubscribes take effect immediately, the origin of the address can be proven. Aurora Hive Sales takes care of all three — but not the fourth, the choice of addresses.

As little as possible, as much as necessary. Two fields determine what will be possible later — email and salutation —; everything else can be added later.

Resist the temptation to fill in fields “for later”. An address book in which every contact has twenty maintained details sounds good and never comes about; one in which every contact has an email address, a salutation and a category comes about in a week and carries every campaign.

As a stopgap, yes; as a goal, no.

Two disadvantages that compound each other: a shared address has no salutation — the personal address is lost. And replies from this address cannot be clearly attributed to one person; if the same address is stored for several contacts, Aurora Hive Sales does not know whom to assign it to.

The usual route: start with the shared address, ask for the personal address at the first contact and switch the contact over.

Treat them like new contacts, not like existing customers. Two reasons:

• Technical: old addresses produce an above-average number of bounces, and bounces harm the sender reputation. Do not send your first large campaign to an old list.
• Legal: the factual connection on which business outreach is based fades over time. What was permissible five years ago may no longer be today.

The practical route: write in small batches, watch the bounces, and write the text so that the time gap is mentioned rather than glossed over.

Yes, but not in the mailing list. Two reasons: they would receive advertising mails from their own company, and they distort every analysis.

The clean way is a tag of its own — for example “internal” — that you never select when putting together an audience. For test mails you use your own address in the test field anyway, not the mailing list.

Do not overwrite. Create the new contact and leave the old one in place — without an email address or with a tag that keeps it out of mailing lists.

The reason is the history: the entire background with this company is attached to the old contact. If you overwrite it, conversations and mails suddenly bear the name of a person who never had them.

Both are attached to the same company file via the Company field — there you see the history together.

Importing it, yes; writing to it is the real question, and that is where it gets tricky. Bought addresses without a recognisable factual connection to the recipient are the case that regularly becomes expensive in Germany.

If you do it anyway, then with these precautions:

• Document the origin — the import remains in the log; that is your evidence.
• Start small and watch the bounces. Bought lists regularly contain many dead addresses.
• Do not start with a new sender address. That is where the damage to the sender reputation is greatest.

And the honest recommendation: a self-researched list of a hundred suitable addresses brings more than ten thousand bought ones.

Yes — and many people do so after the first few weeks, once it is clear what they actually filter by.

Proceed in this order: first think through the new classification and write it down, then switch over in one go. A half-converted scheme is worse than the old one, because a campaign will then miss contacts that actually belong to it.

After the restructuring, check the recipient numbers of your existing audiences — they are the quickest test of whether the switch was complete.

Yes — otherwise shadow lists build up in private mailboxes, and that is worse than an untidy address book.

What you need instead is an agreement: how do we write company names? Which category does a new contact get? Who tidies up afterwards? Settling these three questions once saves more effort than any allocation of rights.

Rule of thumb: whatever you want to filter by belongs in a field. Whatever you want to read belongs in the note.

An industry in the note is useless — you cannot build an audience from it. “Prefers calls in the morning” in a field would be silly.

If you notice that the same detail turns up in many notes, that is the sign that it should become a tag.

So that it fits into the template’s sentence. Check this once in the preview with a real contact — there you see what salutation and last name produce together.

Two typical stumbling blocks: titles (“Dr.” in the wrong field quickly turns into “Dear Dr Dr Meier”) and missing salutations for imported addresses. For the second case there is the fallback wording in the template — set it instead of hoping for complete data.

Few, and each with a purpose. The test question is always the same: will I want to write to this group together one day? If not, it is not a tag but a note.

An address book with eight clear tags works. One with eighty is a search problem — then nobody finds the right one any more, and duplicates such as “Fair2026” and “Fair 2026” appear.