Getting Started: Segments
This document is part of a complete series on Getting Started with Customer.io.
Segments provide an easy way to group People in your workspace. Segments can be used to trigger campaigns, create suppression lists, broadcast audiences, custom conversion goals, and more.
A Segment can have many People and a Person can belong to many Segments. The way People enter and leave a Segment depends on the type of Segment you build (data-driven or manual). For each new Segment you’ll set its name and an optional description. You’ll also choose the type, and define which People belong to the Segment.
As People become members of your Segments, you will start to see numbers next to them in your account. These numbers tell you how many People are in your Segments at any given time. Clicking those numbers takes you to a pre-filtered search where can see a list of people included in the segment. It also gives you an opportunity to export details about everyone in your Segments.
Data-driven Segments
Designed to update as data changes in real time, data-driven Segments let you define conditions a Person must meet to belong. People enter and leave data-driven Segments automatically based on whether they match the conditions you set. You cannot manually add People into a data-driven Segment. They must match the Segment’s conditions in order to enter it. Likewise, you cannot manually remove People from a data-driven Segment. They must stop matching the Segment’s conditions in order to leave it.
To define a data-driven Segment’s conditions, you can use the data you’ve sent. (Attributes, Events, Page Views and Devices.) You can also use meta-data about messages you have already sent to People via Customer.io as well. A Person will match into a Segment when all the conditions you set are true at the same time.
Use data-driven Segments when you want People to automatically enter Segments and Campaigns based on the data you send us.
Example #1:
Imagine People have a “lifetime_value” Attribute that you increase when they pay you. You could have a Segment that will automatically match People when their “lifetime_value” value is greater than 25000. Triggering a Campaign with that Segment would make those People automatically enter the Campaign as well. This would allow you to send special messages when someone becomes a high value customer.
Example #2:
Let’s say you send events to Customer.io when your People visit high value offers on your site. Now imagine a Segment that matches People who have seen the same high value offer five times in the last week but haven’t bought it yet. The Segment could trigger a Campaign to send a special offer while they are still interested.
Manual Segments
Manual Segments allow you to define exactly who belongs to it based on their profile id or email address. People enter and leave manual Segments when you explicitly add or remove them. You can add people to manual segments by uploading a CSV file. You can remove people from manual segments as a part of a campaign or broadcast workflow.
When logged into Customer.io, you can add people to a manual Segment using their profile id or email value. A person must already exist in your Workspace before they can be added to your manual Segment.
Use manual Segments when you have a list of existing People that you want to explicitly group into their own Segment.
Example #1:
You exported a list of People belonging to several different Segments in Customer.io. You need them all in one Segment but they don’t have enough in common to create a data-driven Segment. You can use all their profile idvalues to create a new manual Segment.
Example #2:
You have a list of email addresses you collected at a recent event. You already added profiles for those People to your Workspace and now you want to group them. You can use all their profile emailvalues to create a new manual Segment.
Complete Documentation
For a more comprehensive view into Segments, please review our Segment documentation.
