Some Retently survey campaigns let you apply filters to control which contacts are eligible to receive surveys. When filters are available and the campaign is enabled, any contact in Retently that does not meet the filter criteria will be excluded from the campaign and will not be surveyed.

Below the filters (when shown), you will see a counter indicating how many of your currently existing contacts in Retently match the selected filter rules. This number is a snapshot of your present contact list only. It does not project how many future contacts (ones that will be added later through imports, integrations, or events) will qualify and eventually receive surveys. Because of this, the counter should be viewed as an estimate for your current data, not as a forecast of total survey volume.

In some campaigns, you will not see filter controls at all. This usually means the campaign’s audience is being defined upstream, before data reaches Retently. For example, the sending system on your end might already segment contacts and only pass eligible ones to Retently, making campaign filters unnecessary.

You may see filters but no matching contacts counter. In cases where the in-app counter could be misleading (for example, if most eligible contacts will be added only after the campaign starts), we hide it to avoid confusion. Surveys will still go out to contacts that meet the campaign’s rules at send time, even if no counter is displayed.

If your account is connected to Shopify, one of the audience filters you can add is Order tags. This filter behaves differently from the others, so it is worth understanding on its own.

Order tags are not contact tags. They are the tags on the Shopify order itself, the ones your team or your apps apply to an order in Shopify, such as First order, Wholesale or Point of Sale. Contact tags, which live on the person in Retently, are a separate filter. Filtering on an order tag asks a question about the order that triggered the survey, not about the customer.

When you add an Order tags condition, the dropdown is filled with the order tags your own store actually uses, each with the number of orders carrying it. Pick from that list wherever you can, because a value chosen from it is guaranteed to exist in your store. You can still type a value that is not in the list if you need to.

The list, and every count shown next to it, covers only the orders Retently has received since you connected Shopify. We do not import your historical orders. If your store has years of history in Shopify, the numbers here will be smaller than the ones on your Shopify dashboard, and that is expected rather than a sign that something is wrong.

Order tags are matched exactly, capitals included. A condition set to First Order will not match orders tagged First order. This is the single most common reason an Order tags filter surveys nobody.

If you type a value that differs from a real tag only by capitalization, the message under the filters will point it out, for example: “Your store has no order tag spelled exactly "First Order". The closest match is "First order". Order tags are matched exactly, capitals included.” Selecting the tag from the dropdown instead of typing it avoids this entirely.

You can put several tags into one Order tags condition, but be aware of what that means:

Because of this, if you want to exclude orders carrying any of several tags, add a separate “is not” condition for each tag and leave the campaign set to match all of its conditions. That gives you the exclusion most people expect from a single multi tag condition.

Once you add an Order tags condition, the box under the filters stops showing the generic sentence and tells you something specific about the tag you picked. It is worth reading before you enable the campaign:

The box stays on the generic sentence while the list is loading, when your store has not sent us any orders yet, and when you have selected several tags at once, since no single number describes that combination honestly.

An Order tags condition needs an order to inspect. On a campaign triggered by a Shopify order there is one. On a scheduled campaign there is not, so the condition is skipped.

If the campaign has other conditions, those alone decide who is surveyed, and your audience will be wider than it looks.

Order tag conditions are evaluated at the moment the order reaches Retently. If a condition was wrong and orders were rejected, correcting the condition does not go back and survey them. It applies to orders arriving from that point on. The same is true if you correct the spelling of a tag in Shopify.