You can filter your customers in Intercom based on: the tags they have, the segments they are in, events they have completed, their standard attributes and their custom attributes. This article covers how to use filters with your standard and custom attributes.
There are four types of attribute. Each has different filters:
Text: ‘Starts with’, ‘Ends with’, ‘Contains’, ‘Is’, ‘Is not’, ‘Is unknown’, ‘Has any value’.
Number/Decimal Number: ‘Greater than’, ‘Less than’, ‘Is’, ‘Is not’, ‘Is unknown’, ‘Has any value’.
True or False (Boolean): ‘True’, ‘False’, ‘Is Unknown’, ‘Has any value’.
Date: ‘More than’, ‘Less than’, ‘Exactly’, ‘After’, ‘On’, ‘Before’, ‘Is unknown’, ‘Has any value’.
Important: 'Is' and 'Is not' filters are case sensitive. A filter like 'Name is "john doe"' will not match a user with the name 'John Doe'. 'Name contains "john doe"' will match.
Standard attribute filters
You can filter your customers based on their activity with these standard attributes:
Last contacted at - The time they were last contacted by you, with an auto/manual message, or with a reply in a conversation.
Last heard from at - The time they last contacted you, either directly or in reply to a message.
Last seen - The time they were last tracked by Intercom in your app or on your site.
You can also filter for those customers who can receive email messages:
Unsubscribed from emails - If this is “True” these people will not receive any auto-message emails or manual message emails sent to a large audience.
Has hard bounced - This will be “True” for any person that you’ve tried to email where that email bounced back to Intercom. We’ll no longer attempt to send any emails to this address.
Marked email as spam - “True” for anyone who marks one of your emails as spam. We’ll no longer attempt to send any emails to this address.
Important: Intercom applies these filters to your message audiences automatically, which can lead to lower numbers than expected.
Looking to send a campaign to all brand new users? Just add a filter in the entry criteria for “Signed up after Today’s date”. This will exclude all your existing users, and start sending to your new ones from tomorrow.
To filter your customers by country, use the full name of the country like this:
Click here for the full list of the ISO 3166 country names available.
Date filters
Each “day” in Intercom’s filters represents a 24 hour period, beginning at the current moment. This means that a filter for “signed up exactly 0 days ago” would match any user who signed up less than 24 hours ago. If they signed up between 24 and 48 hours ago, that’s “1 day ago”.
If you want to create filters for dates in the future, you need to use negative numbers. For example, if you want to send an auto message to customers 3 days before their subscription ends, first create a "subscription_ends_at" custom attribute and filter for "more than -3 days ago":
Then, to ensure it doesn’t send to anyone whose subscription has already ended, add a filter for "less than 0 days ago."
Important: Filters for “less than X days ago” will also apply to dates in the future. If you’re filtering on an attribute that can be a past or future date, add a filter for “More than 0 days ago” to only target those in the past.
Company filters
If a person is a member of multiple companies in your workspace, only one of their companies needs to match a filter for them to be returned. For example, if you create a filter for “company plan is Premium” this will match any customer where at least one of their companies is on your premium plan, even if their other companies are not.
To filter for users that aren't in a company, create a segment with a filter for “company name has any value”, then filter for all customers who aren’t in that segment.
Mobile filters
To identify users of your mobile app/s, you can filter for those with iOS or Android sessions
You can then filter further with more specific filters for each platform like “Last seen on iOS” and whether or not they’re identified users.
To filter for customers who can receive push messages, use the standard attribute “Enabled Push Messaging”.
To identify people using a certain mobile operating system, you can filter for:
OS contains Android
OS contains iOS
OS contains Windows
Important: OS filters will include people who have visited your website or web app from their mobile browser. iOS/Android session filters will only include sessions from your mobile app, where you have Intercom installed with one of our SDKs.
Note: This may not include users on every mobile device, but will cover the majority.
Combining 'And' filters with 'Or' filters
To target a more nuanced set of users or leads, you can combine 'and' with 'or' to create more flexible rules. For example, you could target users on one of two plans, who signed up less than 60 days ago.
Just add the first filter, then click '+ Add filter':
After you add your second 'And' filter, click the '+' to create a filter group, and add your second plan filter:
Finally, set the filter group to use 'Or' logic:
Now, your filters match all users who signed up less than 60 days ago, and are on your 'Trial' or 'Lite' plan.
Tips:
Either get an example user to compare against the filters, or imagine you're a hypothetical user being checked against the rules.
Look at the grouping between filter groups; if it's an 'And' you'll need to match all of the filter groups, if it's an 'Or' you'll only need to match one of the filter groups.
Look at the first filter group. Let's say you match the first criteria. If it's an 'Or', then you already match this grouping without needing to check the other filters. If it's an 'And' you'll need to match the rest of the filters in this grouping.
Progress through each of the filter groups and see at which point you'd match them (or not).
What's next?
After filtering for the right customers, you might want to tag them, or save them as a segment.
Or, send them a targeted auto message.
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