Documentation Center

Searching Contacts

You can perform a search of Contacts in an Address Book or Distribution List to retrieve a list of Contacts that meet 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 .

Before you begin

To search Contacts in an Address Book, you need Contact Management rights and Read permissions for the Address book.

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 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.

Search functionality enables you to perform the following tasks:
  • Check and modify a customer’s contact details
  • Check a Contact’s Mailing history and their response to a Mailing
  • Target mailings by creating Distribution Lists

Procedure

  1. Open 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.
    • Navigate to the Publication > Outbound E-mail node, expand the Folders and select a Distribution List.
    The search filters appear.
  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—indicates 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.
      • Unsubscribed—the Contact would not like to receive email.
    • E-mail error status—indicates whether problems have been encountered sending emails to the Contact:
      • No problems—emails sent to this Contact should arrive without incident.
      • Temporary problems—emails sent to this Contact have encountered temporary problems, for example, the Contact’s email Inbox was full.
      • Persistent problems—emails sent to this Contact have encountered permanent problems, for example the email address of the Contact does not exist.
    • ActiveYes or No indicating Contacts who can or cannot receive e-mails.
  4. Define Contact details filter options using Filter operators.
  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. (Optional) If you are specifying multiple Keywords as criteria and you want the Segment to include only those Contacts that match all the defined Keywords, select the Limit results checkbox at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, the Segment will include Contacts that match any one of the Keywords, but not necessarily all of them.
      • You have two Keywords to categorize Contacts based on the contact type, either Business Contact and Consumer Contact. In this case, you probably would not want to use the Limit results option because the desired behavior is to include Contacts tagged with either the "Business Contact" or "Consumer Contact" Keyword.
      • You have added one Keyword to select Contacts based on their being tagged as a "Business Contact" and added a second Keyword select Contacts that are tagged as "European Contact" — in this case, you select Limit results so that the Segment will require a match on both Keywords.
    6. To remove a Keyword, select it click the Remove button.
    7. Click Close when you have finished adding 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
    • Select one or more Contacts in the list view and choose Add Contacts to Distribution List from the context menu

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 Distribution List or Segment based on the filtered Contacts in the list view.
  • Click Reset to view all Contacts and restart a search.