While it’s easy to set up filters to include contacts in a list, excluding contacts often requires an extra step.
Certain filters like the 'Marketing Email' filter does not have exclusion options such as ‘Contact was not sent email’. This also becomes tricky when you want to exclude multiple criteria, which can make the filters section in the list editor messy and confusing.
That said, an easy way to resolve this is by creating another list that meets all the criteria that you want to exclude. After which, you can then use the ‘List Memberships > [Name of List] > Contact is not member of list’ filter in your main list. Here’s how you can do this:
Step 1: Creating the Exclusion List
Create a list containing the criteria that you want to exclude. In this example, I want to exclude contacts that were sent a particular marketing email - the filter that I will use is ‘Marketing Email > [Name of Email] > Contact was sent email’.
Step 2: Use the Exclusion list as an ‘AND’ filter
Once the list has been created and saved, add the Exclusion List as an ‘AND’ filter for each condition on your main list. For example, if I want to pull a count of contacts who are customers but hasn’t been sent that particular email, here are the filters I would use:
As a quick tip, rather than adding the exclusion list as an ‘AND’ filter for each ‘OR’ section (if the list is especially complicated) - the newly made exclusion list can also be used with the main list in a completely new list as well: