NOTE: This article is for customers with the "classic" Admin interface (horizontal top-navigation bar).
If your interface is different, view the New Admin Experience version of this article.
Marketing Automation Search allows you to create advanced searches for your recipients. The advantage of using Marketing Automation Search is that it generates a list of recipients meeting any combination of criteria you specify.
Create a search query
To use the search, click the Marketing Automation Search link on the sidebar of the Automation tab.
On the search page, you can specify one or more conditions to include in your search. There are dozens of possible options. For each option, there are additional criteria you can add to define the condition.
EXAMPLE: Click select condition to bring up a menu of options. Under message, select Opened a message. Specify one or more messages and define a time period. The search will return recipients who opened one of the specified messages in the time period.
Click add another condition to continue to build your search. Recipients must meet all conditions to appear in the results.
- To delete one condition, click the X to its right.
- To delete all conditions, click Clear All.
Use conditions
It’s better to use your most restrictive conditions first. Doing so pulls a smaller initial dataset and returns results more quickly.
EXAMPLE: You want to see a list of all recipients from New Jersey who opened a specific message. Generally, there are many more recipients from New Jersey than there are who opened one that one message. It’s faster for the system to pull all the recipients who opened the message and then filter those by state than it is to pull all New Jersey recipients and determine which ones opened the message. For this example, make the first condition to check who opened a message and the second condition to check the address.
You cannot use all not conditions in your search unless one of them is not in a group. Otherwise, at least one of them must be a positive condition.
In order to show up in the results list, recipients must meet at least one of the criteria for every condition. (In logic terms, this means that the logical operator within a condition is always OR, and the logical operator between conditions is always AND.)
EXAMPLE: If you have two conditions: the first checks whether recipients have opened two messages and the second checks whether recipients are enrolled in two campaigns. You can think of these conditions as a grid:
| Condition | Criterion | Criterion |
|---|---|---|
| Opened a message | Message 1 | Message 2 |
| Is in a campaign | Campaign 1 | Campaign 2 |
A recipient will show up in your results if they meet at least one column for every row. For this example, you will see any recipient who opened either or both messages and who is also in either campaign or both.
EXAMPLE: If you want to see only those recipients who have opened both messages, create two conditions (one checking Message 1 separately and one checking Message 2 separately), then you will only get recipients who opened both.
If you are searching for values in a text field and want to use OR statements, use the double-pipes operator: ||. This will return results that match any of the search terms, separated by the double-pipes. You can string together multiple criteria with double-pipes.
EXAMPLE: You are looking for any recipients who have either Anna or Benjamin as a first name. You create a condition that searches the First Name field and specify anna||benjamin as the criteria. All recipients named Anna or Benjamin are returned (as long as they match your other conditions.)
EXAMPLE: You do not want any recipients with the title Vice President or President to be included in your search. You create a condition that searches for Title fields which do not match vice president||president. The results contain only those recipients who have a different titles.
Review results
- Click Search to see your results. The number of results will be displayed.
- Click Export to generate a .csv file of the results. To download the file, go to Tools > Reports > Upload & Export Job Status and click the file name under Automation Export.
- Click Add to group to add all the returned recipients to a group. Choose one of the available groups or create one.
NOTE: If you add recipients to a group that is currently part of a campaign, the recipients will be enrolled into the campaign.
If there are 1,000 results or fewer, you will also see a paginated list of recipients.
- Click Show / hide columns to choose which columns to display. The three options are First Name, Last Name, and Email.
- Select one recipient and click Details to be taken to their profile page. Click History to be taken to their recipient history page.
Search limitations
Marketing Automation Search only returns data from when marketing automation was activated for your account. For example, if Benjamin opened messages prior to the activation and after the activation, the search will return only the post-activation messages. All post-activation data will be available, even information about messages you sent through the normal interface, or recipients who have not yet been enrolled in a marketing automation campaign.
Search results and groups
Marketing Automation Search can make advanced enrollment much easier. You can now conduct a Marketing Automation Search with all the conditions you like, then review the results and, finally, add the results to a group. You can then use that group — instead of the Advanced Workflow Builder — for enrollment in a campaign.