Segments

Segments

Segments

Introduction

Segmentation is powerful feature that helps you to target a target audience based on their attributes and/or activities. Email marketing becomes very powerful when you send the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Therefore, we strongly recommend you to segment your audience based on their interests and activities to build a long-lasting successful email marketing operation.

There are two types of segments:

  • Global Segments
  • Global segments are applied to all subscribers in the system and with the help of global segments, you can re-route an outgoing email delivery to a different delivery server. You can learn more about global segments in this article.

  • List Segments
  • These segments are created inside subscriber lists and they only affect the owner list audience. List segments can be used for targeting a small set of people inside a subscriber list:

You can see how a list segment targets a small subset of a list audience based on custom field (attributes) and activity filtering.
You can see how a list segment targets a small subset of a list audience based on custom field (attributes) and activity filtering.

How Segments Work?

Segments work in realtime. When you setup a segment with one or many rules, the audience of the segment is calculated on-demand. For example, if you have a repeating campaign which gets executed every day at 9 AM and if that campaign targets a segment with “subscribers who have subscribed yesterday” rule, every time the campaign is executed, the audience will change based on the rule.

This makes segments very powerful and time saver for your high-precision targeted email campaigns.

Rules in segments are sequentially filtered. Below, you can see a diagram that represents how rules are structured and executed.

This diagram represents how segment rules are structured and executed.
This diagram represents how segment rules are structured and executed.

A segment can have one or many rules. These rules are connected to each other with “AND” or “OR” conditions.

For example; the following segment will target any subscriber with a Gmail address and from the United States:

[Rule #1: EmailAddress contains “@gmail.com”] AND [Rule #2: Country is “United States”]

Here’s another example segment which targets anyone from the United States or Canada with a gmail address:

[Rule #1: EmailAddress contains “@gmail.com”] AND ([Rule #2: Country is “United States”] OR [Rule#3: Country is “Canada”])

Creating a Standard Segment

In order to create a segment, login to the user area, click “Lists” on the top menu and go into any list you would like to create a segment. On the left side menu, click “Segments” link:

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Click “Create” link to create a new segment and start setting up your segment.

The first thing you need to do is to name your segment. Make is enough explanatory for your own use.

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Segment names are never exposed to your subscribers.

Choose how to apply rule matching to your segment rules. Match “all rules” (which means AND operator) or Match “any rules” (which means OR operator). Here’s an example to both of these options:

Match “All Rules”

[Rule #1: EmailAddress contains “@gmail.com”] AND [Rule #2: Country is “United States”]

Match “Any Rule”

[Rule #1: EmailAddress contains “@gmail.com”] OR [Rule #2: Country is “United States”]

The next step is to set rules for your segment. You can set as many rules as you need:

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Once you are done with your segment rules, click “Create” button and your segment will be ready to be used with your email campaigns.

Creating a Trailing Segment

Trailing segment is a segment based on dynamic rules. For example, “subscribers who have subscribed yesterday” is a trailing segment because every new day, it includes a different set of auto responders.

Some examples to trailing segments:

  • Subscribers who have subscribed yesterday
  • Opened any email in the last 10 days
  • Trial expires in 2 days
A representation of trailing segments. As the time moves on, a different set of audience is picked based on rules.
A representation of trailing segments. As the time moves on, a different set of audience is picked based on rules.

Below, you can see an example rule which targets anyone who has subscribed yesterday:

This rule targets anyone who has subscribed yesterday
This rule targets anyone who has subscribed yesterday

Here’s another segment which targets any subscriber who has opened an email at least 1 time in the last 30 days:

This rule targets any subscriber who has opened at least one email in the last 30 days.
This rule targets any subscriber who has opened at least one email in the last 30 days.

Trailing segments can contain both static rules (ex: email address contains “gmail.com”) and trailing rules (ex: subscribed yesterday). With the help of trailing segments, you can create evergreen email marketing campaigns that run forever.

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Trailing segment feature is very powerful for some specific use cases such as deliverability warm-up campaigns, active audience identification campaigns, or simply onboarding campaigns.

Creating a Randomized Segment

You can enable randomizer for any segment by checking “Pick random audience matching the segment rules” option. Once it’s checked, Octeth will ask you the audience size to pick randomly:

Randomizer is enabled for this segment. This segment will pick 200 random subscribers from the segment audience every time an email campaign targets this segment.
Randomizer is enabled for this segment. This segment will pick 200 random subscribers from the segment audience every time an email campaign targets this segment.

Randomized segments can be very helpful to “experiment” your email campaigns on a smaller target segment audience. To maximize the effectivity of your experiments, these smaller groups are randomly picked.

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Every time a campaign is sent targeting the randomized segment, a different set of audience will be picked randomly.
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