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Building a Segment

A segment is the audience. It names a datastore, the criteria for inclusion, and which fields hold the contact details.

Where to find it

Architect Panel → Commercial:

  • Campaign Manager — where segments are built

Architect Panel → Data:

  • Datastores — the datastore a segment selects from

What a segment defines

  • A name.
  • The datastore to select from.
  • Criteria — which records qualify.
  • The e-mail field and name field.
  • A phone field, for SMS and WhatsApp.
  • An address source, where postal details are held elsewhere.

Any datastore, not just contacts

A segment can select from whatever you have modelled — customers, members, applicants, tenants, alumni. The only requirement is a field holding an address for the channel you are using.

Map the right field

The commonest segment error is pointing the e-mail field at the wrong column — a secondary address, an account contact rather than the person, an internal owner's address. It produces a campaign that sends successfully to entirely the wrong people.

Check the mapping by looking at a handful of resolved recipients before sending, not by re-reading the configuration.

Criteria are a data quality test

Building a segment usually reveals how good your data is. Records with no e-mail address, obvious test entries, people who left years ago — all of it surfaces the first time you count an audience.

Fix the data rather than working around it in the criteria. A segment excluding "records with 'test' in the name" is a note that your data has test records in it.

Exclude what should not receive anything

Suppression and topic preferences are applied automatically at send time, so you do not need to filter for them. What you do need to think about is business exclusions — customers in dispute, accounts in arrears, people already contacted this week.

Check the count

Look at how many records a segment resolves to before scheduling. A number wildly different from what you expected means the criteria are wrong, and it is far better to find that out now.

An audience of 40,000 when you expected 4,000 is the kind of mistake that cannot be taken back.

Keep segments named clearly

They get reused, often months later by somebody else. "Active customers, UK, opted in to product news" is a segment somebody can use safely; "Segment 3" is one they will guess at.

Re-check reused segments

Criteria that were right six months ago may not be now — a status value renamed, a field repurposed. Before reusing a segment for a significant campaign, look at the count and a few resolved recipients again.

Worked example

A team builds a segment of customers who bought in the last year, expecting about 900. It resolves to 3,400, because the date criterion matched the record's creation date rather than the order date. Caught before sending, fixed in a minute — and it would have been a substantial embarrassment.

Recommendations

  • Check the count before every send.
  • Inspect a few resolved recipients, not just the configuration.
  • Fix data quality rather than filtering around it.
  • Name segments so somebody else can use them.