Documentation Center

Searching Contacts

Before you begin

Depending on where you are performing a Search, you need the following rights:

  • To search Contacts in an Address Book in a Publication, you need Contact Management rights and Read permissions for the Address book.
  • To search Contacts in an Address Book in System Administration, you must have Tridion system administration privileges.
  • To search Contacts in a Distribution List, you need Distribution List Management rights and Read permissions for the Outbound E-mail Folder.

About this task

You can perform a search of Contacts in an Address Book or Distribution List to retrieve a list of Contacts that meet a certain criteria. Search functionality allows you to check and modify a customer’s contact details, check a Contact’s Mailing history and their response to a Mailing, and target mailings by creating Distribution Lists.

You can search for Contacts using the following search filters which you can choose to show or hide in the user interface:

Standard filters
General Contact Mailing information.
Contact details filters
Specific information about a person or organization.
Keyword filters
Specific Contact preferences, characteristics, or interests.

The result of a search is a list of Contacts that meet the criteria defined in the search criteria.

Procedure

  1. Open the Content Manager Explorer.
  2. Select an Address Book or Distribution List to view the search filters:
    • Navigate to the Publication > Audience Manager node and select an Address Book. Select the (All Contacts) node if you want to perform a search on all Contacts in all Address Books in the Publication.
    • Select a Distribution List.
  3. Define Standard filter options:
    • E-mail address—fill in all or part (the first characters) of an e-mail address.
    • Based on—for Distribution Lists only, you can filter Contacts based on filters defined in another Segment, Address Book or Dynamic Address Book (in addition to other filters you may define).
    • E-mail type—specify the Contact’s preferred e-mail format. Select either HTML, Text, or Multi-part.
    • Subscription status—the status of a Contact's subscription:
      • Opted-in—the Contact registered as a subscriber and confirmed the registration.
      • Subscribed—the Contact registered as a subscriber, but did not yet confirm the registration. This is the default value.
      • Unsubscribed—the Contact would not like to receive e-mail.
    • E-mail error status—indicates whether problems have been encountered sending e-mails to the Contact:
      • No problems—e-mails sent to this Contact should arrive without incident (the default value).
      • Temporary problems—e-mails sent to this Contact have encountered temporary problems, for example, the Contact’s e-mail Inbox was full.
      • Persistent problems—e-mails sent to this Contact have encountered permanent problems, for example the e-mail address of the Contact does not exist.
    • Active—select Yes or No indicating Contacts who can or cannot receive e-mails.
  4. Define Contact details filter options using GUID-B9E0CEAE-F451-4093-91A2-9CC297F8EC41.html#CONCEPT_CCD62EA017AA4133A6D110C6AB9A4C36.
  5. Define Categories and Keywords filters to filter Contacts on their assigned Keywords:
    1. Click Add.
    2. Browse to and select a Keyword.
    3. Click Insert.
    4. Repeat the procedure to add more Keywords.
    5. Click Close when you have finished adding Keywords.
    6. Select the Limit results check box to only include Contacts who have ALL the listed Keywords in their Contact details (leaving the Limit results check box deselected includes Contacts who have one or more of the listed Keywords).
  6. When you finished defining search criteria, click the Search button.

    The list view shows a filtered list of Contacts whose details match the specified search criteria:

    • Sort the results by a specific Contact field by clicking on the corresponding column header.
    • Select a Contact and choose Open from the context menu to open the Contact for editing.
    • Make a subselection of the selection displayed by clicking the drop-down arrow next to a Contact field column header for example Subscription Status and selecting a specific value such as Opted-in. The list view is updated to show only those Contacts of which the Contact field has the value you selected.

Results

You have performed a search of Contacts in an Address Book or Distribution List and viewed the list of Contacts that match the search parameters you entered.

What to do next

When you have performed a search, you can do the following:

  • Click Export to export the filtered Contacts in the list view.
  • Click Save to create a Dynamic Address Book based on the filtered Contacts in the list view.
  • Click Reset to view all Contacts and restart a search.