Have an option for 'is not blank' when creating segments

We need to query custom date fields for blanks. There is no way to do that. We can query Not Blank but don't have the converse.

9 Comments
Frankie_P
Moderator
Status changed to: Open Questions

Hi @registration thanks for sharing this feedback! What is an example of a custom field in your account you are trying to create a segment with?

registration
Brand Influencer

The field we want to query for a blank date is Signature Date.

registration
Brand Influencer

I apologize. I have that backwards. We can query  the date for Is Blank. I need to be able to query for Is Not Blank.

Caitlin_M
Administrator
Status changed to: Voting Open
 
LionJamieH
Rookie
Your criteria includes 'is blank' but not 'is not blank' This makes my segmentation criteria more complicated than it needs to be.
Frankie_P
Moderator
Status changed to: Open Questions

Hi @LionJamieH thanks for sharing this feedback with us! What kind of fields are you planning to segment as having a value, but not worried about the specific value? Having any specific details on this is helpful information for us to track to our Product Team.

LionJamieH
Rookie

Within our organization people often end up wearing multiple hats. They may be the secretary of their club, but also the chair of something at the district level or something similar. So they end up having multiple titles.

 

Our goal is to be able to email all the presidents, or all the council chairpersons or maybe the presidents the secretaries and 3 other titles, so we'll be tweaking the segmentation often.

 

If a person has multiple titles, then in our reports they will have multiple entries. My excel import sheet had duplicates rows for anyone with more than one title. Everything but the title column was duplicate data. Since the email matched, these duplicates were not loaded into my contact list.

 

In order to segment they way I need to I needed to add a series of custom columns, one for each possible title an individual may have. In excel I then populated the cells in these new columns when the person held that role, otherwise the cells were left blank. 

 

To make them easy to read I populated them with the title, so in my segmentation my criteria needs to be if 'President' field is 'President' instead of simply if 'President' field is not empty. 

 

I will go one step further though, and say that if 'Add Tags' had been a field option when importing a spreadsheet, then any of the unique titles would have been tagged with their title, and I could have used tags instead of segmentation. Because I would have had to add ~5500 tags manually to my records, I instead went with the data layout I describe above.  Allow me to explain. If I could have set the Title field to something like 'Add Tag' when importing, then each unique value in the title column would have become a new tag, and that tag would be applied to every applicable record.  I have about 5500 records, but only around 2 dozen titles, so those 2 dozen titles would have automatically been created as tags, and the records automatically tagged with those values. 

 

 

Caitlin_M
Administrator
Status changed to: Acknowledged
 
Michaeld00
Rookie

I also need to know how to query a field that is not blank. We can query filed "is blank" but cannot query "is not blank". We need that to create a segment of contacts purchasing direct from us versus our distribution channels. There is an ID number that would allow us to quickly create the segment we need, but we need the option to query the custom field in a general sense. If Big Commerce ID is not blank that will segment our customers from our imported Salesforce list of contacts. 

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