Segmenting your contacts based on their interests, demographics or stage in the buying cycle is an essential way to send targeted messaging that brings better results. In Ontraport, you’ll use groups to segment your contacts.
Contact groups are based on tags as well as fields in contact records, and they’re dynamic, meaning they automatically update when the contact qualifies (or no longer qualifies) to be a member of the group.
Think about groups as saved searches: When you create a group, you’re setting up a search for all contacts that meet certain criteria and saving that search with a name so you can go back to it whenever you’d like.
Your groups use the terms “AND” and “OR” as well as negative conditions to search for the contacts you’d like to interact with. These terms are known as boolean operators. Here’s how they work:

Note, negative conditions must be connected by AND to properly exclude values.

Once you have a group created, you can select it and perform actions manually that will apply to everyone in the group, such as sending an email, adding/removing a tag, or adding them to a automation map. 


To create a group

  • To create a group, go to the contacts tab.
  • Click on the Group dropdown menu and select the new group button. Name the group.
  • Select a group permission to limit who can view or edit the group.
  • Click the add new condition button to start building your group.
    1. Choose a contact field, condition, and value for each group criteria you add.
    2. To add another field value to a group condition, hover over the condition to be added to and click  the add value button.
    3. To add another group condition, click the add new condition button
  • Click the orange save button.
  • Verify that your new group contains the contacts you know meet the conditions.

Use Case

Let’s say you want to see a list of everyone in your database who’s from Canada or Mexico and is a client. You’ll set up your conditions like this:

  1. “Country is equal to Canada OR Mexico”
  2. “Contact Tags contains Client”

group condition example

Note, you’ll need to have created the Client tag to label which contacts are clients for this to work.

To delete a group

When you delete a group, you’re deleting your saved search conditions — your contacts will not be deleted.

  • Go to  and select the group you want to delete from the “Group” dropdown.
  • Click  → .
  • Click  to confirm you want to delete your group.