Getting Started with Segments

Your audience contains a lot of information about your contacts, such as when they were added, where they live, and how they interact with your marketing. Use this information to filter contacts into segments, and then send them targeted emails, text messages, or ads.

In this article, you'll learn how segments work in Mailchimp.

Definitions

• Segment
  The term segment is used as a verb and a noun. To segment is to filter and divide similar contacts. The resulting list of contacts is also called a segment.
• Conditions
  The rules that determine how contacts are included in a segment.
• Logic
  The and/or variable that determines whether a single or all conditions must be true in a segment.
• Subscribed contact
  Someone who's opted in to receive your email or SMS marketing.
• Unsubscribed contact
  Someone who previously received your email or SMS marketing, but has opted out.
• Non-subscribed contact
  Someone who's interacted with your online store, but hasn't opted in to receive your email or SMS marketing.

About segments

Segments are used to create targeted messages to contacts who share data. When you create a segment, you'll set conditions to filter contacts based on the information that's available in your audience.

For anyone with a Free or Essentials marketing plan, each segment can include up to 5 conditions with a single and/or logic operator. Anyone with a Standard, Premium, or Legacy plan with Mailchimp Pro can use the advanced segment builder. Each segment with the advanced builder can have unlimited conditions, with nested and/or logic operators.

Depending on the segment’s and/or logic, only 1 or all conditions must be met.

Here's an example: You want to invite new subscribed contacts to your online store. You can create a two-condition segment of contacts who signed up for your audience in the last 30 days, but haven't made a purchase yet. For this example your logic will be “and”, because both conditions must be met.

After you build the segment, you can send a targeted message to your contacts, such as a welcome message or special offer.

Build and save segments to use with emails, text messages, and ads. If you're working with an email or text message, we'll automatically remove anyone who isn't subscribed to receive your email or SMS marketing.

Segments can be created in the email builder, the SMS builder, or the contact table. Save a segment in the contact table if you know you want to target contacts on a regular basis. Create as many segments as you want and add contacts to multiple segments, as long as they share data that meets the segment criteria.

Mailchimp also offers a selection of pre-built segments based on email engagement, purchase history, and other valuable information. These segments can be found in the To section of the email checklist and on the audience Segments page.

How the advanced segment builder works

Advanced segments are similar to regular segments, but you'll find more depth to their logic and structure. The advanced segmentation builder is a feature available to anyone with a Standard, Premium, or Legacy plan with Mailchimp Pro. It allows you to efficiently filter contacts and test your emails. This builder can include nested conditions that allow for different combinations of data you’ve collected, such as purchase activity, gender, age range, and more.

For example, instead of sending 2 emails to 2 regular segments, you can send a single email to 1 advanced segment that includes the same contacts.

When you combine and/or logic in a single segment, you're able to include contacts who meet significantly different conditions. There's no limit to the number of conditions in an advanced segment, but the generation process may slow down as you add more conditions.

The advanced segment builder is a powerful tool that can help you identify complex relationships that your contacts share.

Advanced segment builder logic

The advanced segment builder combines individual conditions to sort contacts into nested groups. A top-level segment filter is required, and shares its logic with the groups that follow it. Secondary logic can be applied to the conditions inside each group, but each group is taken collectively and weighted equally.

Read our article on logic in the advanced segment builder to learn how to build your segments and view examples of complex segments.

Differences between segment builders

Segmenting options

Mailchimp offers a lot of segmenting options that will help you make the most out of your audience. With the right kind of data, you can create focused segments of your contacts for emails, text messages, or ads.

When you choose your segment conditions, you may have these options, depending on the data you’ve collected and your marketing plan.

• Email/SMS marketing status
  A contact's marketing status tells you what their relationship is to your email or SMS marketing campaigns. Use the email or sms marketing status column to see who’s subscribed, unsubscribed, or non-subscribed. All advanced segments include the email marketing status condition. However, to view the SMS marketing status, your audience must have SMS marketing set up.
• How your contacts are tagged
  Filter by a saved tag.
• Contact details
  This category contains conditions based on a variety of data about your contacts. These conditions include email address, email client, language, contact rating, VIP status, email marketing engagement, predicted gender and age range, and more.
• E-commerce activity
  If you've connected your online store, you can segment by purchase activity, such as timeframe, email interaction, store, product, product category, and total spent.
• What your contacts have done
  Segment based on your contact's email interaction activity, such as whether an email was sent, opened, replied to, or clicked.
• Email marketing engagement
  Segment your contacts based on how they interact with your emails. We take that activity, compare it to how long they’ve been in your audience, and classify them on an engagement scale like new, rarely, sometimes, or often.
• Customer lifetime value
  Segment your contacts based on how much they are likely to spend in your store.
• App engagement
  If you’ve added custom events through the API, create a segment based on when an event occurred, as well as specific event properties.
• Website engagement
  If you've enabled tracking for a published website, create a segment based on if and when a page visit occurred.

To learn more about the conditions listed here, take a look at All the Segmenting Options.