Sort and Segment Your Contacts

Here’s my database with all of my contacts in it. Let me show you how to filter this list to only show a specific group of contacts.

I wanna ask the system: Show me all of my past customers. I could just click on this menu and select past clients. In about 1 second, it shows that I have 89 past clients in my database, and here they are. From here I can easily send them all an email, start them on an Autoresponder, set up a to-do for all of the, and a lot more.

We need to set up this ability in advance. You can’t just decide today, “I wanna look at all of my past clients”… If you haven’t already told the system that John is a past client, Mary is a past client, and Linda is a past client. To do that, let’s jump into settings.
Here you’re going to see Categories, Category 2 and flags. These are the three ways you can segment your database. Categories and flags are used differently. In categories, the contact can only have one of these assigned to him or her, and same with category 2.

In flags, a contact can have multiple flags assigned all at the same time. Most people use categories and flags when setting up their database. You’ll wanna go in and edit these libraries to match the type of business you are in. Categories and flags assigned to an existing contact can be edited, changed, or rearranged at any time.

Let’s add a new contact to the database so you can see how this all fits together.

When filling out a contact card, fill out all the demographics and then over here.. You’ll select a Category, assign some Flags, and then click save.

Now we’ve laid the groundwork for my searches. I’ve set my settings with categories and flags that make sense to me and the hard work is done.

If you set up your database using Categories and Flags— it will be easy to work with your contacts for years to come. By the way, don’t worry if you can’t think of all the Categories and Flags you’re gonna need in the future, just set it up how you’re thinking today. You can always go in and add, delete, and change things as time goes on.