Create & Manage Smart Lists

What you'll learn

Common Use Cases

Once you know how to build and manage smart lists, here's what you can start doing right away.

⚡

Segment Automatically

Build lists of leads, active customers, and prospects that update on their own as contacts meet or stop meeting your criteria, no manual updates required.

🎯

Target With Precision

Combine multiple filters at once, like a contact who opened an email in the last 30 days and has an open invoice, to reach exactly the right people.

⚙️

Power Your Automations

Let actions in a workflow, like adding a tag, automatically add a contact into the matching smart list, so your data stays organized as people move through your funnel.

📧

Send Targeted Campaigns

Send an email campaign straight to a smart list instead of your whole contact base, so every message lands with the people it's actually meant for.

Key definitions

Terms worth knowing

A dynamic contact list that updates automatically based on filters and conditions you set. Unlike a static list, contacts are added or removed on their own as they start or stop meeting the criteria.

A condition used to narrow down which contacts appear in a list, such as a tag, a custom field, engagement activity, or an opportunity stage.

The full menu of fields you can filter contacts by, including tags, source, city, state, email activity, campaign status, pipeline stage, and many more, with new options added over time.

A second filter added with "and" so a contact must match both conditions to be included, for example having a follow-up tag and coming from a specific source.

A banner that appears any time you adjust a smart list's filters without saving, reminding you to save, save as a new smart list, or discard the change.

A smart list shared so every team member who logs in can see it, shown with a small world icon. Leave that setting off to keep a list visible to only you.

"It's the best way to manage your contacts and really keep clean data, and not send them things that they don't need or want."

How it works

Building, Filtering, And Managing Smart Lists

Start from All, then narrow it down

When you land on Contacts, the very first list you see is a smart list of all of your contacts. To build your own, select Advanced Filters, choose the criteria you want, and select Apply. That applies the filter to your contact view without saving anything yet. When the results look right, look for Unsaved Changes at the bottom and choose Save As A New Smart List, then give it a name, like "Activity Date Thirty Days," and select Create Smart List. You can also select the plus button next to your existing lists and choose Add A Smart List to start a brand-new one the same way.

Filter by almost anything on the contact record

Advanced Filters covers a long list of fields: address, age, date of birth, business name, city, company name, country, created date, email, who's following, Facebook ID, Google ID, Instagram ID, last email opened or clicked date, phone number, source, source type, tag, time zone, valid email, valid WhatsApp, website, and DND settings for calls or email. It also includes contact activity like campaign status and last activity, opportunity information like pipeline stage, and group access like course or product access. Tag is the most commonly used filter. You can combine more than one filter, and use "add nested filter" to require a contact match both conditions, like a follow-up tag and a specific source, joined with and or or.

Watch for the Unsaved Changes banner

Any time you adjust a smart list's filters, a banner appears letting you know you have Unsaved Changes. That's your reminder to Save, Save As A New Smart List, or Discard the change before you move on. If you discard, you'll be warned that any filters you added will be lost. This keeps you from accidentally editing a list you didn't mean to change, or losing a filter combination you actually wanted to keep.

Organize everything from Manage Smart List

Select the three dots near your lists and choose Manage Smart List to see every list you've built, including any global lists and lists shared by or with you. From here you can drag and drop lists into the order you want them to appear, copy a smart list, share it as a global list so your whole team can see it, edit its name, or delete it. A list you don't mark as global stays visible only to you, so you can keep personal working lists separate from ones the whole team relies on.

Put smart lists to work in campaigns and workflows

In Marketing, when you send or schedule an email campaign, you can send it to specific contacts or send it straight to a smart list, so your message reaches exactly the segment you built it for. In Automations, an action inside a workflow, like adding a tag, can automatically place a contact into the matching smart list as it moves through that workflow. Together, that means your segmentation, your marketing, and your automations all stay connected without any manual list building.

Tips

Worth remembering

Tag is the most commonly used filter, so it's a great starting point for your first smart lists, like a "Follow Up" or "High Priority" tag.
Use a nested filter when you need a contact to match more than one condition at once, like a tag and a source, rather than either one on its own.
Always check for the Unsaved Changes banner before you navigate away, and choose to save, save as a new smart list, or discard so you don't lose or accidentally keep a change.
Only mark a smart list as global if you want your whole team to see it. Leave it off to keep a personal working list just for you.
Reuse your smart lists in email campaigns and workflows instead of rebuilding a segment from scratch each time you need it.

Check yourself

Quick Knowledge Check

Four quick questions on this lesson. One attempt each, and the answer is revealed either way.

0 of 4 answered

What is a smart list?

What happens when you add a nested filter with "and"?

What does the Unsaved Changes banner mean?

What makes a smart list "global"?

Apply it

Try this with your favorite AI

📊Design my first set of smart lists

You are helping me plan the first set of smart lists for my contacts in my software. Here is my situation: - The types of contacts I work with: [leads, active customers, prospects, etc.] - The tags or stages I already use, or want to start using: [list them] - What I most want to track or follow up on: [describe] Based on that, suggest 4 to 6 smart lists I should build, the filters each one should use (including any nested "and" filters), and a short, clear name for each so I know exactly what it's for.

🚀Plan how I'll use smart lists in campaigns and workflows

You are helping me connect my smart lists to my email campaigns and automations in my software. Here is my situation: - The smart lists I already have or plan to build: [list them] - The kind of campaigns I send: [newsletters, promotions, follow-ups, etc.] - The workflow actions I use most, like adding tags: [describe] Based on that, suggest which smart lists I should target with which campaigns, and how I could use workflow actions to automatically keep those smart lists accurate over time.