Guide to the "Has been sent" Segment Condition

The “Has been sent” condition allows you to target contacts who have already been sent a specific campaign. It can also be used to exclude those who have already been sent either a specific campaign or any campaign.

This applies to emails from larger campaigns and one-off emails sent as part of an automation. This condition does not apply to personal emails sent from the Contacts section, a contact’s profile page, or Deals.

The segment builder is one of ActiveCampaign’s unique differentiators, accessible across the platform to allow for highly dynamic targeting of your contacts. As a condition within our segment builder, you can use “Has been sent” from anywhere in the platform where the segment builder is available.

Check out our feature guide for more on using the segment builder.

Read on to learn more about the “Has been sent” condition and how to get the most out of it in your future marketing and sales processes.

Using “Has been sent” in Contacts to Create Segments

You can use “Has been sent” to segment contacts from the Contacts section in ActiveCampaign.

First, you’ll need to access the segment builder. Click within the Search field and select “Advanced search” from the dropdown menu:

Click the first box on the left to select a condition and select “Actions” under “Option categories” to find the “Has been sent” condition.

The text “Any email” will appear in the box on the right with the option to select what period they were sent the campaign.

You can keep the selection as is to segment contacts who have been sent any campaign email or click within that box to select the particular email you’d like to use in your segment; once you have made that selection, you can then choose what period the campaign was sent to them, i.e. In the last 30 Days. 

Note: The “Has been sent” feature enables you to segment off of every email you’ve ever sent from your ActiveCampaign account. 

You can then use the Save as Segment button to make your new segment accessible across all lists on your account. If you want to create a segment ahead of time and be able to use it later when sending a campaign or building an automation, you can do that here, from the Contacts section.

This is useful if you want to create a saved segment that you anticipate using often in the future. Since all saved segments automatically update as contacts meet the conditions, you only need to create the segment here once, and it will remain updated throughout the platform moving forward.

Using “Has been sent” in an Automation

You can use “Has been sent” in an If/Else condition as part of an automation. We’ll show you how in the following example.

Let’s say you have a VIP ticket offering for an upcoming event you’re organizing, and you want to send a “First time special offer” email to every contact who achieves this Goal for the first time. (A Goal is an action you can add to an automation in ActiveCampaign.)

To begin this automation, you would use the “Goal is achieved” start trigger with “Purchased VIP ticket” as your goal. Since this is a goal that contacts can achieve multiple times (if you run more than one event per year that contacts would buy tickets for), you would elect to have this automation run “Multiple times.” Meaning, a contact would run through it every time that contact purchases a VIP ticket.

Because the automation is configured to run multiple times, you will need to segment your contacts into those who have already received the “First time special offer” email and those who have not, to avoid sending it to contacts who are not first-time VIP ticket purchasers.

To do this, add an If/Else condition as an action and use the “Has been sent” condition to sort those contacts who have already received the email from those who haven’t:

1. Click the plus icon to add an action.
2. Under “Conditions and Workflow,” find and select the If/Else condition.
3. In the segment builder, select “Has been sent” under “Actions” and choose the “First-time special offer” email.

Then, in the “No” path (those who haven’t received the email), you can add a “Send campaign” action to send the special offer email to those contacts.

In the “Yes” path (those who previously received the email), you can simply end the automation:

Or, instead of ending the automation, you could add an action that increases contacts’ lead scores, adds a tag, etc. Our platform is flexible in the way that you can build only what you need for the time being, always with the opportunity to return later and add on as needed.

Summary

The “Has been sent” condition allows you to target contacts who have already been sent a particular campaign or exclude those who have already received it.

Getting some ideas for how you’ll use the “Has been sent” segmenting condition now? Let us know in the comments below.