When you manually start a flow, you'll notice that there are checkboxes within the dialog box. These are options that allow you to skip certain contacts when starting your flow and better target your audience.

First, enter the contacts or groups you want to start in the flow or search for contacts based on contact field. The search query you enter will operate on all contact fields present in your account. Note that fields and values are not case sensitive within a query. See more here about how to write your query operators and statements.

Next, choose from the targeting options. You can opt to only include:

• Active Contacts who have sent you a message in the past 90, 180, or 365 days (click the drop-down to adjust the time to your preference).

• Contacts not currently in another flow. Since a contact can't be in two Messaging flows at the same time, check this box to avoid interrupting them. Need to start a flow without interrupting any contacts from another flow? Check out Background flows!

• Contacts who have not been in the this flow in the last 90 days, giving them a chance to re-start the flow.

Once you've selected the contacts or groups to start in your flow and checked any of the flow start options you desire, you'll see a precise contact counter at the bottom of the flow start box. This is the number of contacts who'll be started in the flow. Clicking on the count will take you to a search results page to preview the contacts who will get started in the flow.

Even More Advanced Targeting

You can change the query that is starting contacts in the flow by clicking "Edit Query" at the bottom right. In the example below, we've written a query to search not only for a particular group & flow as chosen in the flow start dialog, but also for the contact field building that already exists in our testing workspace.

We've updated the query to group = "Greenville Branch Employees 1" AND history != "Registration Flow" AND fields.building = "Hudson"

Learn more about writing search queries here.

Need more information on flows? Take a look at our entire collection of articles and don't hesitate to reach out with any questions, suggestions, or insights.