Searching for a Contact

  • Updated

Contact Search is the fastest way to find a single person across every list in your account. It checks every field mapped to a system field and returns one row per email address, so you don't get the same person back five times because they sit in five lists. Reach for this when you already know something about the contact and just need to open their record.

Who does this: Marketing ops, customer support, anyone who needs to pull up a contact quickly
Time needed: A few seconds once you know the search bar exists
Why this matters: Browsing lists to find one person is slow and error-prone, especially if the contact appears in several places. Contact Search skips all of that and takes you directly to the one record that matters.
In plain English: It's Act-On's global search bar for people. Type anything you know - a name, a domain, a company - and it looks across every list at once.
Quick Reference (Advanced Users) - Click to Expand
  • Search scope: every list, every system-mapped field.
  • Match type: partial matches work (@gmail.com, john s). Boolean operators and quotes are not supported.
  • Deduplication: results are grouped by email address only.
  • Indexing: list changes are picked up shortly after you make them.
  • Next step: click a result to open the Contact Report.
Try it like this: Search for @gmail.com to pull up every Gmail contact in your account, then click a result to open their Contact Report and review recent activity.

Use Contact Search any time you need a specific person and don't want to browse through lists or segments to find them.

  1. Select Search All Contacts from the top-left search bar.
  2. Type a name, email address, company, or any other mapped contact field.
  3. Press Enter or click the magnifying glass.

Search example

Search tips

  • You can combine pieces of information in a single search - for example, email plus company.
  • Partial matches work: typing @gmail.com returns every Gmail contact.
  • Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and quotation marks are not supported.

View search results

Results show one row per unique email address, even if that address appears in several lists. Sort any column to find what you're after.

Search results example

Click any result to open the full Contact Report, where you can review activity history, current segments, list membership, and other data points. Learn more about the Contact Report.

Technical details

Contact Search watches your lists for changes and reindexes any fields mapped to system fields on a rolling basis. Recent edits appear in search results shortly after you save them.

Act-On treats contacts as the same person when their email addresses match across records. No other unique identifiers are used today.

Next steps

  • Editing a Contact: update a contact's fields once you've found the right record.
  • The Contact Report: review engagement, scoring, and list membership for the contact in one place.

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