An audience you've built once shouldn't be rebuilt by hand. Save it as a segment and load it into the next send, schedule, journey or experiment. Segments can also come from Insights: the people who clicked, answered or bought in one email become an audience for the next.
This is part 3 of a three-part series. Part 1 built a filter and part 2 read the audience it targets. This part keeps that work for later.
The examples follow Retro Revival, a fictional vintage clothing shop, with made-up numbers.
Save a filter as a segment
On an email's Send page, build the Audience filter, either for a one-time send or a recurring send. Then open Saved segments and choose Save current filter as segment…, and give it a name, such as "Grunge fans: Rock–Alternative and 1990s".
A segment is a saved copy of the rules, not of the people. Who it holds is worked out again every time it's used, so new subscribers who match are included and those who unsubscribed are left out.
Load it where you need it
- Send page. Load a saved segment… above the audience filter fills the filter with the segment's rules, for a one-time send or a recurring send.
- Experiments. Start from a saved segment on the Audience & sample step copies the rules into the experiment. A note says so: editing the filter afterwards changes it there only, not the saved segment.
- Journeys. The Enters a segment trigger starts a journey when a contact begins to match a segment, and a branch step can test one.
Loading copies the rules, so a send that already went out never changes when you edit the segment later.
A segment in an experiment
An experiment can take a random sample from the segment's contacts, or all of them with The whole segment. The whole segment is rule-based selection, not a random sample: arms are still assigned at random, but the results describe that segment only, not your list in general.
Save the people from an email's results
Insights can turn people who did something in an email into a segment. Click any number or chart mark in an email's Insights to open Recipients: the people behind it, such as everyone who clicked the carousel. Narrow the list with Add condition if you need to, then click Save as segment.
The dialog shows the segment's Rules before you save:
- "Was in the audience of" the email, with the sends and dates you were looking at.
- One rule per condition on that email, such as having clicked the carousel. Contact-field conditions become ordinary field rules.
The segment is pinned to the email's contact list. It's worked out again each time it's used, so people who respond later count too. The dialog also lists what it can't keep: people who aren't contacts, such as Send API recipients, contacts deleted since, and contacts on other lists. A date range is saved as fixed dates, so days after it aren't added.
After saving, load it from the audience filter on the Send page of any email that goes to that list.
An example follow-up
After its reward test, Retro Revival opened Insights for the 90s Edit email, clicked the carousel's click count and saved "Clicked the 90s Edit carousel" as a segment. Next month's restock email used it on its Send page, so only subscribers who had shown interest in those products got it.
Plans and limits
Your plan sets how many segments you can save; see pricing. Rules about purchase history work in a send's and a schedule's filter, but not in a journey's branch. Rules about an email's responses work everywhere segments do.
Getting started
Open the Send page of your next email, build its audience filter and save it with Save current filter as segment…. Then open Insights for a recent email, click a number that matters, and save those people with Save as segment. For the rules a filter can hold, see behavioral segments.