Filtering Contacts in Interspire Email Marketer

Filtering lets you work with a smaller, targeted selection of your contacts rather than an entire list. You can use it to find one person, isolate an entire domain, pull everyone who bounced, or build a segment for a campaign.

The same filtering panel appears in three places: when viewing contacts under Contacts → View Contacts, when sending an email campaign (tick “Yes, show filtering options on the next page”), and when configuring an autoresponder. Everything below applies to all three.

Standard options for filtering contacts

These options are available every time you filter, on any contact list.

Email address – matches on a partial string. Entering [email protected] returns that single contact, john returns every address containing “john”, and @example.com returns everyone at that domain.
Format – HTML contacts, text contacts, or both.
Confirmation status – confirmed, unconfirmed, or both. Use this to find contacts who never completed double opt-in.
Status – all, active, bounced, or unsubscribed.
Filter by date – subscribed before a date, after a date, or between two dates.
Clicked on link – contacts who did or did not click a tracked link in a previous campaign.
Opened email campaign – contacts who did or did not open a previous campaign.

A note on the open and click filters

Automated security scanners and inbox protection services now click links and load tracking pixels on the recipient’s behalf, so raw open and click data overstates real engagement. Before you use these filters to build a “highly engaged” segment – or to prune contacts you believe are inactive – read Decoding Automated Email Clicks and Managing the Rise of Email Bot Clicks to understand how Interspire Email Marketer filters this traffic.

Filtering on custom fields

Custom fields belong to individual contact lists, so custom field filters only appear when you are working with a single list – not when you have selected several lists at once.

Once you are collecting data through subscription forms, modify-details forms or imports, you can combine those values in a filter. A checkbox field holding favourite sports lets you find everyone who likes both soccer AND cricket, or everyone who likes neither. Number fields accept comparisons, so entering > 21 in an age field returns every contact over 21.

The more you know about your contacts, the more specific your campaigns can be – sending relevant content to a defined segment rather than a broad email that tries to cover every topic at once.

For a full worked example, see Sending Emails Based on Subscriber Segmenting. To create the fields in the first place, see Custom Fields & Mail Merge and Collecting Additional Information From Contacts.

Common tasks when filtering contacts

Reactivate an unsubscribed contact

Go to Contacts → View Contacts and choose “Specific contacts from within the selected lists below”. Select the relevant list, or –All Lists– to see every unsubscribed address. On the filtering page set Status to Unsubscribed and click Next. Use the Edit option beside an address and change its Status to Active.

Only do this where you have a documented request from the contact. Resubscribing people who opted out will damage your sender reputation and may breach CAN-SPAM, GDPR or CASL.

Export everyone who opened a particular campaign

Select the contact list, tick “Yes, use filtering options”, then choose the campaign under Opened Email Campaign. The resulting set can be exported as normal.

Clear out stale unconfirmed signups

Filter by Confirmation Status = Unconfirmed combined with a subscription date more than three or four weeks ago. Interspire Email Marketer can also be configured to remove unconfirmed contacts automatically after a period you choose.

Preview who a send will actually reach

Before sending a campaign or enabling an autoresponder, run the same filter combination under Contacts → View Contacts. The count you get back is the audience your send will reach. This is the quickest way to catch a filter that is narrower than you intended.