Segmentation is a method of choosing only subscribers who match specific characteristics at a specific time.
When it comes to email marketing, segmentation allows you to easily send highly targeted content to your subscribers. It also makes searching for, working with, copying, deleting, moving, or exporting a select portion of your subscribers much easier!
Why would I want to segment my subscribers?
Let's say you're a fruit vendor or blogger and you're wondering if a course on apples, filled with recipes, growing tips, and helpful picking techniques, would be worth your time to create? Are enough people interested in apples? Before working on the material, you would search for subscribers tagged apple.
How they became tagged with apple is determined at an earlier phase of this process. You can learn more about how to create and apply tags to subscribers here.
Then you can work directly with this segment of subscribers for this project first to gauge the possible success of the course, before releasing it to the rest of your list.
When you search for all subscribers tagged apple, you're working with segmentation. Specifically, in this example, the apple segment of your subscribers.
How to View a Segment with Subscriber Search
Using the example above, we'll pull a segment of subscribers who are tagged with apple. (Please note we'll be working with an internal list that only has 5 subscribers.)
From a List Dashboard, choose Recent Subscribers to view a full list of your subscribers to that mailing list.
You'll see all the email addresses subscribed to that mailing list:
Set your filter criteria at the top of the page and hit the play icon to apply the filter.
It's important to note here, we chose Contains versus Matches, knowing some of the email subscribers are tagged with multiple fruits. If matches were selected, only those subscribers were only tagged apple would appear in the results. For this case, we're interested in anyone who is tagged with apple as an answer for their fruit preferences, even if they are tagged with other choices.
After you hit the play icon, your subscriber list will update with any email address that is tagged with apple:
From here you can export a copy of this list and use it to create a group to shape your mailings or set aside to work with in the future.
And that is how segmenting can be applied to subscriber management. As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to let us know. You can find all of our great support resources and how to get in touch with us via email, chat, or phone on our Support Page.