- What is segmentation
- Benefits of keeping one email list
- Things to know before you go
- Create segments in MailExpress
- Examples of commonly used segment rules
- Active users
- Gmail & Yahoo users
- Randomly pick 100 users
- Re-engage users
What is segmentation
Segments can help you separate your contacts list into groups (a contact can belong to multiple segments) based on their sources, user activities, demographics, geographic, psychographic, etc. Through segmentation, you can send emails with more personalized content to a specific group of your contacts. Contacts in each segment update dynamically as their pieces of information or preferences change over time.
Benefits of keeping ONE email list:
Although MailExpress allows you to create unlimited numbers of email lists in your account, there are good reasons why you should avoid using multiple contact lists. Using a single email list and segmenting that list is a better approach most of the time.
- When a recipient unsubscribes, the recipient is unsubscribed at the list level. Therefore, keeping a single list can avoid sending campaigns to unsubscribed users if they belong to multiple lists.
- Having a single list can help you better track your campaigns’ historical data and performances; the data may not be transferable or shareable if you use multiple lists.
- You can only select a single list of recipients each time when creating a campaign email. Keeping contacts in multiple lists means you will have to create and send multiple campaigns if you want to send emails to all subscribers.
- Segmentation rules are based on every single list, not across lists. You can organize your contacts with different custom fields in one list rather than maintain multiple lists in your account.
Things to know before you go:
- You can no longer delete a segment but edit it once you have used it to send campaigns.
- Be careful with complex segment rules, and double-check if the result meets your estimate.
- If you have made changes to the segment, the system will show you the before and after counts and ask you to confirm the update.
Create segments in MailExpress
MailExpress allows you to segment your contact list using the values saved in your contacts’ custom fields. You can easily drag, add, edit, and delete segment rules or segment rule groups. We will first show you a step-by-step example before we create more complex segment rules.
- Go to Lists, and select the list that you want to segment. In this example, we will segment the list named “test” which has 20 contacts.
- In this example, we want to put all the internal users (5 contacts) in this test list (20 contacts) into a segment. These internal users have the value ‘Internal’ saved in their ‘Source’ field.
- Click the three dots (...) on the top right corner of your screen -> click Segments to view any existing segment rules.
- This list does not have any segment rules yet. We will create a new segment rule by clicking -> Create Segment.
- First, name your segment, click -> Add Rule button to add a new Rule, then select whether you want the filter results to match all, any, or none of the rules. Use Add Rule Group button to add any sub-groups.
- We first name the segment “Internal Users”. We want to add a segment rule based on the values in the ‘Source’ custom field, so we select ‘Source’ from the drop-down list.
- Select -> is since we want to filter out the contacts whose ‘Source’ has the value ‘Internal’ saved.
- Type in the value ‘Internal’ and click on -> Add.
- Click on -> Refresh Counts. The 5 contacts from the ‘Internal’ Source are filtered out.
- Save the Segment. A segment of internal users is created (the number of people in this segment will grow as you grow your contact list).
Examples of commonly used segment rules
Now you get the basic idea of segmenting your contact list in MailExpress. Let’s take a look at some more complex segmentation examples:
- Active Users: an active user is a subscriber who opens your campaign emails for a given period (e.g., the lastest open/click is in the last 60 days, or the sign-up date is in the last 30 days).
- Gmail & Yahoo users: use Contains or Match (with regular expression) statements to find email addresses that contain @gmail.com or @yahoo.com.
You can use the “match” statement when there is more than one string and separate them using the vertical bar “|”. You could also use multiple “contains” statements to achieve the same result. However, this might be tiring when you have multiple strings.
- Randomly pick 100 users: ID is between 200 and 299.
- Re-engage users: the lastest open/click is between the last 90 to the last 30 days.
Use the “Between” statement to filter a time frame:
