Creating and Editing Segments

To create a common segment, go to the Contacts menu, Segments and click Create Segment. 

The common segments (contact, behavior, geolocation and Smart Insight) have the following properties:

• Name – This is automatically generated by Emarsys and which you can keep or change. Segment names must be unique in your account.
• Description – This can help you identify segments easily in the Overview page, for example by highlighting which segments use Smart Insight or geolocation criteria.
• Source list – All segments are run against either all contacts in your account, or on a specific contact list. You cannot run a segment directly on another segment, but you can combine multiple segments together.

In this section you can see when the filter was last run to generate the segment, as well as how many contacts it contains. Click Save & Apply to generate the segment again.

Click Display Contacts to list all the contacts and save them as a contact list.

This is where you define which contacts should be in the segment. You can base this on various criteria, see below. Within each category, you can create any number of conditions, but all on the same level and all linked by the AND operator.

Conditions are added and removed via the + and - icons.

If you want to define a more complex filter, for example with nested conditions or using both the AND and OR operators, click Advanced Filter Options.

To add a nested sub-criterion, click the plus sign on the right side. Select the AND/OR operator from the drop-down menu.

In the example figure above, the new segment is created with the following criteria:

• all contacts are from Germany, AND
• they have an email address, AND
• they are female AND have more then 3 children, AND
• one of the following criteria is true:
  • they are older than 30, OR
  • their education is to university-level or unspecified, OR
  • they work in retail/wholesale/e-commerce, OR
  • their marital status is single or unspecified.

There can be many levels of nested sub-criteria, but we strongly encourage not using more than 4 levels since it makes the criteria on the screen very hard to decypher.

These are based on your contact database and include both system and custom fields. For each field, the appropriate conditions are offered. For this reason it is important that you use the correct field type when creating custom fields.

Some date fields are dynamic, meaning they are calculated by Emarsys when the segment is generated. These are mostly date-related fields such as Age.

When you have finished adding the contact criteria, select the AND/OR operator and add the Email and mobile behavior criteria.

These are based on the contacts’ responses to your email campaigns (or lack of them). For example, you can filter for contacts that have received more than three email campaigns in the last month but have not made any clicks, or for those contacts who have clicked the most links in a particular category.

The following behavior criteria are available in the pop-up window:

• Email response (open or click)
• Email response (click only)
• Email bounced (bounce notification)
• No email response (open or click)
• No email response (not clicked)
• Individual link clicked
• Individual link not clicked
• Links in category clicked
• Links in category not clicked
• Received an email
• Not received an email

Depending on the criteria you choose, you can further refine your filter with a number of additional options.

• Timeframe – Restrict the response to a specific time period.
• Volume restriction – Restrict contacts by the number of emails they responded to.
• Device (Mobile/Desktop) – Select between desktop or mobile (or both), and if mobile, select from a range of platforms.

Note: The contact behavior here depends on the notifications returned by the target email client. This may not always exactly reflect the behavior of the recipient. Therefore the following points should be considered when filtering for contact behavior:

• An email which is opened without images does not return an open indication.
• Emails which are read in the mail client preview window also do not return an open indication, unless the client is set to display images.
• A contact may click a link several times to open it. Depending on the click speed and browser settings, each click could be counted separately even though the link was opened only once.

In most (though not all) cases, Emarsys can identify the city where a response was recorded. In the Geolocation Criteria feature you can select a location, city or country anywhere in the world and create a segment of the contacts who responded within that area during the selected time period.

• Timeframe – Here you select the timeframe for the responses.
• Target group – Emarsys initially treats every contact as a visitor to a given location until their behavior has become regular enough to identify one location as their home. This categorization is dependent entirely on their responses and has nothing to do with any database fields (e.g. City, State or Country). These categories are constantly evaluated and updated by our algorithms after every response.

You can select a country by entering its name in the Location field. Once you are done, the country will be highlighted on the map.

You can select a city either by planting a marker on the map with your mouse, or by entering an address in the Location field.

The map automatically zooms in or out, if necessary, to show the selected location.

While Emarsys can precisely select countries by their borders, for cities and other locations, you have to define a radius. The radius is measured from the city center or the location marker and creates the area in which responses are identified. You can choose your unit of distance (miles or kilometers) during account setup and modify it on your My Profile page. The minimum radius is 25km; there is no maximum radius.

Click Calculate Contacts to show how many contacts in the selected target group have been identified for your location.

You can only use one set of geolocation criteria per segment, but within that you can define as many locations as you like.

If you are using the Emarsys customer intelligence module Smart Insight, you can also add filter criteria based on eRFM activity and web behavior.

These segments are initially saved with a single Smart Insight criterion taken from the report. You can further modify this criterion by clicking Edit:

All additional attributes that you add here will be linked by the AND operator (i.e. all must be true for all contacts in the segment).

You can create new criteria by clicking +. In this case, you have the choice between the AND and OR operators.

You can also define the operators between the Smart Insight, Contact and Behavior criteria by selecting Advanced Filter Options.

To create a Mobile Engage segment, click Create Segment and select Mobile Engage segment.

Add a descriptive name and an optional description to your segment. This will be helpful later.

Select the template to use for the segment. For the time being, there is only a Mobile Engage unified template available.

Select your app, and then add the conditions of the segment. Please note that the conditions are grouped with the AND operator. When you are finished, click Save & Apply.

Web Behavior Segmentation is based on visitor interactions on your website that you can collect using Web Extend. For example, it allows you to personalize content for visitors who purchased items of a certain value, viewed a product in your webshop, or visited pages of a certain category.

Web Behavior Segmentation uses the following templates:

• Visitors who added items to the cart with a value – Select the timeframe and value of the visitor's cart. The currency is the default defined in your account.
• Visitors who viewed content – Select the timeframe and tag criteria. Tags allow you to collect data in the form that suits your particular use case.
• Visitors who viewed pages in category  – Select the timeframe, category and occurrence.