Deleting a person in CamBuildr is irreversible. The person record and the content attached to them (donations, posts, support statements, survey answers) are removed, their profile and its activity timeline disappear, and they are also taken off any automatically or manually exported lists. What deletion does not do is rewrite history in your reporting: aggregate figures such as the number of sign-ups in a period keep counting activity that already happened. This article covers every way people leave your database, from a single profile to replacing a whole list, and, just as important, the things that look like deletion but are not.
Somebody asks you to stop using or storing their data
Which action you need depends on what the person actually asked for. The three requests look similar and do very different things.
"Stop emailing me." → Unsubscribe them. The record stays, the unsubscribe is written to their activity timeline, and they are left out of every future send.
"Delete my data" or "I withdraw my consent to store my data." → Delete the person. Unsubscribing is not enough here: it keeps the full record — name, email address, postal address, custom fields, tags, activity, donations, posts — and the person still counts toward your contact limit.
"Send me everything you have about me." → use Request data output in the profile actions before you delete. Once the person is gone there is nothing left to export.
If you want a waiting period between stopping the mail and erasing the record, switch on Settings → Privacy → Automatic deletion and unsubscribe the person: they are deleted automatically once they have been unsubscribed for the number of days you set. That setting is off unless you switch it on.
CamBuildr cannot tell you which of these a particular request legally requires — check with whoever is responsible for data protection in your organization.
What counts toward your contact limit
Every person record counts: subscribed, unsubscribed and blocked people alike. Unsubscribing or blocking somebody keeps their record and does not free up space. The only thing that reduces the count is deleting the person.
You can see your plan and contact limit under Settings → Organization. If you are close to it, the sections below tell you how to clean up.
Deleting one person
Open the person under Database → People and use Delete in the profile actions. You will be asked to confirm.
This needs the person admin permission. Superadmins have it; a Campaigner may not. If you do not see the button, ask your Superadmin.
Your own profile and other administrators cannot be deleted this way.
Unsubscribing, blocking or deleting several people at once
In the list under Database → People, tick the checkboxes in front of the people you want. A toolbar appears with Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Block, Unblock and Delete. Each action asks for confirmation and tells you how many of the selected people it will affect.
Select all selects the current page only, not every matching person. For more people, repeat the action page by page.
The filter next to the search box narrows the list to Subscribed, Unsubscribed or Blocked people. There is no filter by tag or target audience on this list. For a tag- or audience-based cleanup, use a workflow or ask support (see below).
Delete needs the person admin permission. Administrators and your own profile are skipped automatically.
Automatic deletion of unsubscribed people
Under Settings → Privacy → Automatic deletion you can have CamBuildr delete everyone who has been unsubscribed for a number of days you choose. This runs once a night, is available on every plan, and applies retroactively to people who unsubscribed before you switched it on.
This makes a simple two-step cleanup: unsubscribe the people you want gone (in the list, or with a workflow), and let automatic deletion remove them after the waiting period. Until they are deleted, they still count toward your contact limit.
Details: Managing Privacy Settings in CamBuildr.
Deleting or unsubscribing a whole list with a workflow
When it is several hundred people, clicking through pages is not an option. The tool for this is a workflow, driven by a CSV import. It works because every CSV import records a "was imported" action on each person in the file, whether the person is new or already existed, and a workflow can start on exactly that action.
1. Build the workflow first (Database → Workflows):
Start: the action was imported.
Condition: has tag and pick a fresh tag such as cleanup-2026. The condition stops the workflow from touching any other import.
Action on the yes branch: Delete the person, or Update subscription / block state → unsubscribe if you prefer to let automatic deletion finish the job later.
2. Switch it on. A workflow that deletes people needs CamBuildr approval: request activation from the workflow page and our team will review and switch it on. A workflow that only unsubscribes can be switched on right away. The workflow must be on before the import runs, because people enter a workflow at the moment the action happens.
3. Import the removal list. Prepare a CSV with the email addresses of the people to remove and import it under Database → People → + → Import CSV file with:
Existing contacts: Update. In Ignore mode existing people are skipped and get no "was imported" action, so the workflow would never see them.
Tags: the cleanup tag from the condition.
Only the email column mapped. Nothing else about the people changes.
Everyone in the file enters the workflow and is deleted or unsubscribed. An email address that did not exist yet would be created and then removed again by the same workflow, so keep the file to people who are in your database.
4. Afterwards switch the workflow off so a later import with the same tag cannot trigger it by accident.
Example: replacing an old list with a cleaned one
You have a target audience built from an old import and a new, smaller CSV that should replace it, including some people who are not in CamBuildr yet.
Open the old audience → Export snapshot → Add a tag and tag everyone, for example old-list.
Import the new CSV with Existing contacts: Update and the tag keep-2026. New people are created, existing ones get the tag, nobody is removed.
Create a target audience: has tag old-list and not has tag keep-2026. Refresh the count; these are the people to remove.
Export that audience as CSV (Export snapshot → Export as CSV) and run it through the workflow above as the removal list.
Delete the old target audience if you no longer need it. This removes only the saved selection, never the people.
Asking support
The CamBuildr team can delete or unsubscribe all members of a target audience for you on request. Build the audience so that it contains exactly the people to remove, check its count, and send us its name through the chat. This is the quickest route if you do not want to set up a workflow.
After deleting: what a target audience still shows
A target audience is a saved rule, not a stored list of people. Deleted people leave its List of contacts straight away, because that tab is read live from your database. Anybody you can still see there therefore still exists.
The big number at the top of the audience page is a different thing: a stored counter. It is kept up to date as people join, leave or are deleted, and it is rebuilt whenever the audience is recalculated — but it is not a live count. It can be behind while a recalculation is still running (the number is greyed out and the page refreshes itself), or if a recalculation was interrupted. If the number and the contact list disagree, open the audience and save it again to force a recalculation, or ask support to rebuild the counters for you.
If the people are still in the contact list itself, they were not deleted. Check under Database → People whether the records still exist — unsubscribing or blocking keeps the record, and so does deleting a target audience or removing a tag.
What does not delete anyone
Deleting a target audience. An audience is a saved selection. Deleting it removes the selection; every person stays in the database and keeps counting toward the limit.
Removing or merging a tag. Tags are labels; the people keep their records.
A CSV import. An import can only create people, update their fields and add tags. It cannot unsubscribe, block or delete anyone, cannot remove tags, and does not blank out fields that are empty in the file. There is no status column to map.
Unsubscribing or blocking. Both keep the record. Combine them with automatic deletion if you want the people gone.
Revoking a consent. Withdrawing a consent, or using an unsubscribe link, stops the communication and is logged, but it deletes nothing.