Segmenting Contacts

What is a Segment?

A segment is a section of your contacts based on rules.

For example you can use a segment to pull out all contacts from your list who have a .co.uk email address, or who have a birthday in a specific month, or who have never opened one of your emails.

You can segment contacts based on their data e.g. email address, custom fields etc, or their activity e.g. campaigns opened, links clicked, etc.

Segmenting contacts is useful for things like sending campaigns. For example you could send a campaign only to people who have a birthday in July, who have not opened an email, who have purchased something, the list goes on.

You can add multiple rules to a segment. So you could say: I want only contacts with a gmail.com, address who have been sent a recent campaign, where the company is of a certain size, and who are born in July.

It's a very powerful tool, and the Transpond Segment builder has been designed to make it easy to put together just the segment of contacts you need.

How to create a Segment

1. Go to the Contacts tab at the top of the screen.
2. Click on the Segments tab towards the top of the page.
3. On the segments page, you can see there are already two segments that have been automatically created. You cannot adjust these segments as they are used around the system to segment Blocklisted and Bounced contacts. You can however use these segments yourself later on if they are useful.

4. For now let's add a new segment of our own. Click the +Add Segment button located towards the top right of the page.

   

5. You will be asked to give your segment a name. This is for your own reference. In this example we will call our segment "Hotmail Customers". Click the Next button once done.

   

6. Now we are able to add our first rule to the segment. Let's use the following options to pull out our contacts with the 'Customer' tag:
   1. Set the field dropdown on the left to [Contact or Organisation Tags]
   2. Then set the next field to [Is].
   3. Then select [Customer] (or any other tag you have) in the last box

As you add the filter, you will see results appearing towards the bottom of the page, along with a count of how many of your contacts match the rules.

7. You can carry on adding new rules here if you would like to, but for now click the button to Save Segment, towards the bottom of the screen, to save the segment.

That's it. You've now created your first segment. You will see the segment appear in your list of segments, along with how many contacts from all of your groups that match the segment. If you actually wanted to send a campaign to all of your hotmail contacts, you can now do so by adding a Campaign and selecting the segment.

How to use Segments

Once you have your Segments setup, you can use them for a range of things.

Segments for Email Campaigns

The most common use case is for your email campaigns. When creating your email campaign, you'll be prompted to send it to either a Group or Segment, or even a combination.

You can use a Segment to control who you want to send the campaign to, but you can also use a Segment to exclude a specific list of contacts.

For example, if you have certain VIPs who get their own newsletter, you can create a VIP Segment and exclude them from your general campaigns, and then send them their own emails.

Segments for Automations

Another way to use Segments is in your Automations. A common Automation trigger is when someone joins a Segment. For example, you could have a segment that looks for all contacts with a specific tag. When they are tagged accordingly, they "join" the segment, and at that point they would enter the Automation. Once inside the Automation you can do various things such as send a drop campaign, notify a user, update your CRM etc.

Segments Best Practice

When setting up filters for your Segments, it's important that you consider how the filters will impact the results, and ensure the filters you use won't slow down anything in Transpond.

Avoid using filters with [contains]

Certain filter operators such as [contains] can be resource heavy, meaning it will take a long time to find the results you need, and put an unnecessary load on Transpond. Therefore Transpond limits you to only a few 'contains' filters per segment.

A common filter would be for [Email address] [contains] [hotmail.com] or [gmail.com] etc. Rather than using [contains] for those, there is a dedicated filter for [Email Domain] [is]...

Using filters like that will help ensures your Segments work well and don't cause any disruptions to your Transpond experience.

It's also worth considering using filter conditions like [starts with] and [ends with] rather than [contains], to ensure things run smoothly.