Before diving into the different ways you can search and filter your contacts, it’s important to understand the different ways you can organize your contacts.

Key Levels of Organization:

Groups are the main level of organization within your CRM. They create the bigger “bucket” in which to house contacts of a certain category. You can create as many groups as you need, and further organize these groups into folders for easy management.
User-defined fields are custom fields that allow you to enter additional information into your contact’s profiles and customize your CRM to make it specific for your business needs.
Tags are used as a quick reference among your contact list, they are usually simple differentiators to segment and filter.

Now that you’re familiar with GreenRope’s three key levels of organization, we’ll look at the more complex ways to search your contacts.

Why is Filtering Important?

Segmenting your contacts allows you to create targeted lists of particular contacts or groups of contacts content
Filtering allows you to send personalized and relevant content to specific contacts based on predefined criteria
Filtering is ideal for gathering accurate reports
Set-up automation, move contacts between groups, and filter out certain contacts
Categorizing your contacts improves business efficiency

The filter and search functionalities can be found in many areas throughout your GreenRope account. A few places you can access this feature include: main contact search, build & send email page, SMS/MMS/Voice campaign pages, exporting contacts, and many more.

Basic Filtering and Searching

Once you have selected the groups(s) you would like to search in, you will use the the Filter/Search area to adjust the selection of your contacts. The most common and easy to use filtering options are "Any of the following" and "All of the following." With either of these, you can build up a list of simple filters, where either all of them must apply or any of them must apply. You can filter on any field, including tags and user defined fields. The “Advanced” filters allow for complex grouping of filters. These are meant for the specific needs of the advanced user. You can create filter groups, and sub-groups nesting filters together.

“Include” Categories

By default, only the valid and active contacts in your account will be showing on your list. Since you are not charged for unsubscribes, bounced, or invalid contacts, they are usually hidden from your main list. The Include area is used to easily filter out the contacts you usually won't want.

For some areas of the site, these options will not be editable. For example, you won't be able to select unsubscribed contacts to send emails to.

Advanced “Adjustments” and Filtering

As an addition to the simple searches above, the Adjustments area allows you to add contacts to or remove contacts from your filtered selection above. This gives you great flexibility, such as allowing you to add in contacts from certain events, email broadcasts or locations that aren't a part of your initial group selection. The order of these filters affects the end result, so when you have multiple adjustment filters, they can be moved up or down the list.

To further streamline the adjustments you’re wanting to add, each filtering option has the ability to define how you want to add the filter to your contact list. What is the source, or main group of contacts, that you want to generate this new list from? The “Source” options include:

All Contacts: When selecting to add with this adjustment, contacts will be collected from anywhere in your account.
Initial Selection: Represents the contacts you selected in the Filter/Search area. This is useful if any of your following filters or adjustment filters have removed contacts from your initial selection which you want to add back in.
Filtered Selection: Represents all of the contacts selected using the standard filters above, before any adjustment filters are applied.

Add Attendance Filter [Event Management]

To manage your event registrations, the attendance filter allows you to segment contacts based on:

If they registered to attend your event
Their registration is still pending
They have checked in and attended your event
Did not attend the event
Were marked as unsure
Or if they did not respond to your event invite

Add Delivery Filter [Email Campaigns]

Based on the emails you have sent through the account, quickly generate a list of contacts based on their engagement. By adding a delivery filter, you’re able to add, remove, or isolate contacts based on emails sent through GreenRope.

Contacts who were sent, or not sent, a specific email campaign
Of the emails sent, filter for contacts who read or clicked on the email
Otherwise, filter for contacts who received the email but did not read or click.

Geo-Location Filtering

Using a specific zip code for reference, generate a list of contacts who are in a certain mile radius. The geo-location filtering allows you to add, remove, or isolate contacts based on their distance to US cities or zip codes you define.

Add Random Split

Based on the current list of contacts on the page, the system can randomly narrow this list to a certain percentage. To split your list, simply drag the indicator anywhere from 0 - 100% to generate a randomized list of contacts.

Pick and Choose Filter

Are you someone who prefers to individually select contacts by scrolling through the list? The pick and choose filter is great for lists under 100 contacts. Click on the green plus next to the contacts you want to select. Picked contacts will appear in the top list with a red cross, which allows you to deselect them.

Take “Action” On Your Filtered List

You can perform different actions on these filters and the targeted list of contacts you created.

Loading and Saving Filters - Reuse your lists, whether using the filter exactly or using it as a starting point. You can make the current selection your default, save the filter combination as a template, or load previous templates for quick segmentation.
Modify Groups: Use the current filtered selection and perform specific group related tasks such as "add to", "remove from", "replace into", and "new group."
Reset Filter: Reset the filter back to defaults, removing any changes you've made.
Tag: Tag the filtered contacts with a new or existing tag.
Merge: Merge filtered contacts into one.
Email these contacts: Transfer the current filters to the email page.
Modify contacts: Bulk modify specific fields within each of the filtered contact's profiles.

By default, when you navigate to Contacts > View, the contacts shown are the ones in the group shown in the group drop-down list (on the top left-hand side of your page). The contact search filters will allow you to create a targeted list of contacts based on specific criteria.

Bonus Filtering HACKS

When it comes to searching for specific contact you may need to broaden the search to narrow down the results. The best way to do this is with searchable filter hacks.

% symbol

From the Contact page on the left panel is the Filter/Search area. When defining the items to search, use the % symbol to search for a variable number of matches. For example, by adding gr%n (or g%n) into the search box, you can find “green.” However, g%n will also find “good night” as the percentage sign is not limited to characters. It will pull the contacts who have correlating data that starts with g and ends with n.

_ underscore

You can use the _ (underscore) character to find a match to a single character. The underscore works as a placeholder for any single value that meets the surrounding items referenced. For example, gr__n (and g___n) will find "green," but g___n will not find “good night.” The underscore helps with creating variables to the single value.

Birthday Hack

This hack also works for birthdays. With it, you can search for people born in a particular month because we store that information in a YYYYMMDD format. Example:

____02__ would match anyone born in February (4 underscores for the year, and 2 underscores for the day). If you don't have a year stored in the contact's CRM, we store it as 9999.

Integrating your business through a complete CRM maximizes your reporting, filtering, and customization capabilities. This article only scratches the surface of the benefits of segmentation!

Why stop here, watch our guided walkthrough webinar on the filtering options available within GreenRope. Or hear from our CEO, Lars Helgeson, in a whiteboard breakdown on how segmentation empowers your CRM integration. To dive deeper into finding the right audience through personalization and segmentation, read our blog post on the four ways to get your email marketing in front of the right audience.

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Contact Filtering: The Adjustments Section