You can use segments to tailor campaigns to your contacts' needs, wants, and interests, rather than settling for a one-size-fits-all message.
With segmentation, you're delivering personalised, targeted campaigns to the right contacts based on contact behaviour, contact data, lists, marketing preferences, and purchase history.
Lists and segments
Dotdigital Marketing has two ways to group contacts:
Lists
Static collections of contacts. Contacts are added to or removed from a list by you, or by the contacts themselves. You can expose lists to your contacts through signup forms and preference centre.
Segments
Dynamic collections of contacts who meet criteria that you define.
Some simple segments might be:
All contacts under the age of 25
All contacts living in London
All contacts that have never opened a campaign
Segments can be more complicated, for example:
All contacts between the ages of 16 and 25, living in London, who have received at least one campaign in the last six months, haven't opened any email campaigns in the last six months, aren't in the list named Gap year, and haven't received any re-engagement campaigns.
The segment builder is a flexible tool, the more detailed the data that you capture for your contacts is, the more targeted your segment criteria can be.
Choose a list or a segment
Use a list when you want a fixed group that you add contacts to yourself, such as an event's attendees.
Use a segment when you want the group to follow rules rather than a fixed membership, such as everyone who hasn't opened a campaign in six months.
For a campaign, you can select lists, segments, and marketing preferences together. A contact who is in more than one of them receives the campaign once.
For a program, a segment is the usual choice, because the program refreshes its own copy of the segment as contacts reach each node.
Ways to segment your contacts
Contact behaviour
The campaigns you've sent to contacts, and how they responded and interacted with them.Data
The data you hold in your contact data fields.Sources
Whether a contact is in a list or has chosen particular marketing preferences.Ecommerce
RFM, ERFM, purchase history, and more, using our ecommerce tools.Location
Location-specific contact data fields, such as town, state, country, or postcode. You can also segment contacts using a map view.
Learn more in Types of segment rules.
How rules combine
Include and exclude rules
Exclusion rules run after the include rules. They only apply to contacts who have already made it through the include rules.
This is why excluding a large segment can change your count by very little. The exclusion only removes contacts that the include rules already found, so the drop reflects the overlap between the two, not the size of the segment you excluded.
AND and OR groups
Rules in the same group are combined with AND by default. For example, if you add these two rules:
Data field GENDER must be equal to Female
Have not opened any email campaign
only contacts who meet both rules are in the segment. To include contacts who match any of the rules, but not necessarily all of them, change the group to OR.
To mix AND and OR logic in one segment, use more than one group. For example, you can build a segment that finds all contacts who:
made a purchase in the last 30 days AND visited your website at least three times
AND
were sent a specific email campaign OR opened any email campaign they were sent in the last 30 days
Segment counts and refreshing
A segment's rules are dynamic, but its saved contact count isn't live. To recalculate the count against your latest data, refresh the segment, or set it to refresh automatically before a scheduled send.
Learn more in Refresh, delete, or export a segment.
What you can do with segments
After you create a segment, you can:
refresh it to update its contact count
bulk update a data field for its contacts
take a random sample to create a smaller list
Segment limits
You can create up to 1000 segments.
Each segment can have up to 30 rules.
Segments only take into account the last 10 years of engagement data.
Your account also has a limit on the number of lists it can have, which depends on your account level.
See also
Create a segment from scratch in the segment builder, or start from one of our templates.