You can use segmentation to group contacts based on demographics, behavior, or preferences, enabling you to send personalized campaigns that are more relevant and engaging to your subscribers. This approach helps optimize campaign performance by delivering targeted content to specific audiences rather than sending generic messages to your entire contact database.
When properly implemented, segmentation can substantially improve engagement rates and reduce unsubscribe rates by ensuring contacts receive content that matches their interests and behavior patterns, thereby maximizing the effectiveness of email marketing.
Segmentation in email marketing involves grouping contacts based on certain rules and conditions set by the marketer. Every contact is unique in nature and therefore requires a different marketing strategy tailored to each one. The strategies depend on various aspects, such as geography, demographics, interests, email engagement, purchase history, and so on. Hence, a marketer needs to identify some common traits by which they can group the contacts.
The idea behind segmentation is to send personalized emails that are relevant and engaging to your contacts. With the help of segments, you can send curated campaigns that help you boost your online sales in the long run.
Although grouping contacts based on specific criteria can be a challenging task, when done properly, it can prove to be a powerful tool in helping you achieve certain marketing goals. Maropost offers a desirable set of functionalities to create, manage, and use segments, making it easy for you to implement segmentation.
Managing Segments
The Email Segments Index page is a place where you can view and manage all the previously created segments. The Index page is designed to allow you to easily create, edit, duplicate, delete, and sort various types of segments with ease.
First, to access the Segment section, navigate to Audience and select the Segment option.
The segments are displayed with the following information:
- Name: Displays the name of the created segment. For more information on segment creation, read our Creating Segments with Next-Gen Segment Builder article.
- Builder: Depicts whether you have used a Legacy or a Next Generation Builder to create your segments.
- Contacts: Mentions the number of contacts that have been grouped to build a segment.
- Created and Updated At: Displays the date at which the segment was created and modified.
- Actions: Allows you to export, edit, archive, delete, refresh, and create duplicate segments, respectively.
Viewing Segment details and Ruleset
To see a detailed overview of the segment, click on the segment name. The Segment Details section displays information such as the segment name, as well as the date and time at which the segment was created and modified. You can also view the number of contacts that are grouped together to create the segment. Additional options, such as refresh contact count, delete, and export options, are also available.
At the bottom part of the detailed page, there is the ruleset criteria used to determine the contact grouping. The ruleset layout is not only made up of a simple and clean UI, but the rules are also arranged in a flowchart-type linear format, which makes the overall flow easy to understand.
If you want to modify the rules or segment details, you can make the changes directly from the view section by clicking on the edit icon. To learn more about such criteria that define a segment, read our Segment Rules (Next-Gen) article.
Using Segments and Refreshing Contact Count
The main use of segments occurs when you are creating email campaigns and journeys for specific audiences.
Segments are also used for dynamic content, where different blocks of content appear in your contacts' emails depending on the segment to which they belong.
Segments are dynamic in nature, pulling up-to-date contacts depending on the selected criteria when refreshed. You can click on the refresh button manually, either from the Index page or from the View Segment Details section.
However, the segments get automatically refreshed whenever they're being used. For example:
- If used in email campaigns, the segment is refreshed when the emails are sent.
- If used in journeys, the segment is refreshed when the contact passes through the segment.
- The segment is also refreshed when exporting the segments.
Archiving and Exporting Segments
You can view all historical and old segments currently not in use from the Archive section.
This section is useful if you want to recheck some old or outdated segments that you may plan to modify and use in the future, depending on your marketing strategies.
Besides archiving, you can also export your segments by clicking on the Export option from the Actions column.
Select the fields from the segment that you wish to export. Avail the MD5 Hash functionality to securely receive files from your Maropost Marketing Cloud account in your mailbox.
