Searching for Contacts based on Activity

✅ Summary:

This video explains how to use PhoneBurner's Advanced Search > Contact Activity feature to find contacts based on specific engagement actions—such as email opens, video views (via SmartSender®), calls, or appointment scheduling—within customizable date ranges.

Key capabilities include:

• Identifying contacts who opened an email or started watching a video during a defined time frame (e.g., last week).
• Filtering contacts who were called, emailed, or who had appointments scheduled, not by the event’s occurrence but by when the action was performed (e.g., date the appointment was booked, not when it will occur).
• Combining multiple activity filters using “AND” logic (e.g., contacts who were emailed and scheduled an appointment).

This level of filtering allows users to build highly targeted lists for follow-ups and ongoing campaigns based on actual engagement behavior, increasing outreach effectiveness.

🏷️ Tags:

advanced search, contact activity, SmartSender®, video tracking, email engagement, appointment tracking, follow-up targeting, call activity, sales automation, PhoneBurner training

📝 Cleaned-Up Transcript:

Would it be helpful to pull a list of all the contacts who opened an email last week? Or even better—how about a list of contacts in your PhoneBurner account who started watching a video you sent in one of those emails last week?

With PhoneBurner's Advanced Search functionality, you can definitely do that. That’s what we’re going to cover in this training as we continue working through the Advanced Search training module.

In the Advanced Search menu, you'll see a number of filter categories. In this video, we're focusing on the Contact Activity section.

When you click on Contact Activity, you'll see a menu of activities that are searchable at this time. For example, you can search for contacts based on whether they picked up a SmartSender® resource you sent—like a video, audio, image, document, or link.

As mentioned earlier, you can search by whether someone:

• Started a movie
• Finished a movie
• Opened an email

You can also search based on your actions, such as:

• Whether you called the contact
• Whether you scheduled an appointment

Let’s clarify something important here: You might be wondering, “Didn’t we already cover filtering by last called date under the Dial Session section?” Yes, but there's a difference.

• In the Dial Session section, you’re searching based on when the contact was last called or first called.
• In the Contact Activity section, you're searching for whether the contact was called within a specific date range—they may have been called again since then. So if you want to find all the contacts you called last week, use the Contact Activity filter.

Similarly, for appointments, this search looks at when the appointment was scheduled, not when it will take place. So if you scheduled someone this week for a call next week, the activity logs this week—not next.

You can also filter for contacts based on email sent activity.

Let’s walk through a specific example: I want a list of all contacts who started watching a video I sent using SmartSender® last week.

Steps:

1. Select the activity: “Started a movie.”
2. Choose whether you want contacts who did or did not perform this activity—select “Yes” to find those who did.
3. Set your date range. You can pick:
   • A specific day
   • Before/after a specific date
   • X days ago
   • A range between two dates

In our example, we want to see activity between two dates (i.e., last week). Once that’s selected, hit Apply and Search.

If you’re testing this in a demo account like mine, you might not have qualifying data. But in a live environment, this would return contacts who interacted with your video during that timeframe.

You can also add more activities to your filter.

Example: Let’s say I want to find everyone I emailed AND scheduled an appointment with.

• Add activity: “Emailed” (Yes)
• Add activity: “Scheduled an appointment” (Yes)
• Click Search

In my demo, this gave me 22 contacts. If I remove the “Scheduled an appointment” filter, it jumps to 432 contacts—everyone I’ve ever emailed.

Switch it again to just “Scheduled an appointment”—I get 25. So 22 of the 25 people I scheduled appointments with were also emailed.

This demonstrates how all Contact Activity filters use AND logic—meaning, all conditions must be true for a contact to appear.

So that’s a quick overview of the Contact Activity section within Advanced Search. It's a powerful tool to help you build precise, action-based contact lists so you can follow up more strategically.

I hope this helps you and your organization get more out of PhoneBurner.

Thanks again—and happy dialing!