In Campaign Studio, segments are lists, or groups of contacts. Use segments to send emails, trigger campaigns, or for analysis. You can add to and remove contacts from a segment, and into static and dynamic segment types.
After creating a segment, click the View Contacts button on
the right side of the Segments page for a list of contacts attached to the
segment. You can also see lists of contacts in a segment by searching
segment:{segment-alias} on the Contacts page.
Static segments are not filter-based. Adding contacts to a segment in one of the following ways:
The two manual options to move a contact into a static segment are:
Inside a campaign, you can add contacts to or remove contacts from segments using the Modify contact’s segment action. To add contacts to a segment, you must have already created the segment and set to Public Segment = Yes.
Modify contact’s segment is available as a submit action on Standalone forms. With a Campaign form, create a campaign with a Modify contact’s segment action.
Once a contact has accrued an assigned number of points, the system can add them to a segment. This may be a segment for your most engaged contacts who become eligible for special offers, or a segment your sales team reviews to find strong prospects.
This accomplishes the same thing as creating a Dynamic segment with a filter for
Points, the operator greater than (or equal to), and the minimum number of
points. The difference is if you only want to add contacts to a segment who
reach the point value after creating this trigger to a segment, you can.
If you have a list outside of Campaign Studio, saved as a UTF-8 encoded CSV file, you can import the list directly into a Campaign Studio segment.
Note
As a best practice, you must create segments before importing contact lists. You can also create segments after importing a CSV file. However, Acquia does not recommend you to create new segments during the import process because it results in some contacts being missed by filters in the dynamic segment build. These contacts do not appear in the new segment immediately but are added in the next scheduled daily build.
Click Contact.
Click the menu in the upper-right hand corner and select Import.
Ensure that the file is in a UTF-8 CSV format. Select your file then click Upload.
At the top of the next screen, select the segment you want to add the contacts to.
Note
You must select a default segment when importing a CSV file.
Map the appropriate fields from the file.
Remember to always map the unique identifier so that you do not create duplicates.
Click Import.
If your file is larger than 1,000 rows, the system changes screens and informs you once the file has imported. After the import is complete, click the Segments section of the platform to see the added contacts.
Campaign Studio moves contacts into and out of dynamic segments based on the filters applied to the segment. As the data associated with the contact updates, including company associations and behaviors, Campaign Studio updates segment membership.
Campaign Studio dynamically moves your contacts to and from segments based on filters. You can filter on contact fields, company fields and even actions, such as emails sent or read.
And and Or operators. An Or operator
creates a new group of filters which can include And operators.Note
Segment building is not real-time. For segment filters based on core fields and custom fields except Date/Datetime type fields, users must wait for up to 10 mins to view contacts under the segment.
Segments with including/excluding filters are not updated when the dependent segment members change. Those get refreshed once per day.
For example, consider Segment A with a filter “country = USA” and Segment B with a filter “email domain = acquia.com and includes Segment A”. If the country of an existing contact is changed to USA, the contact is added to Segment A within 10 minutes. However, it is not added to Segment B until the next day. As an exception, if the country and email address of the contact is changed, both segments are rebuilt within 10 minutes because the field value that is explicitly listed in the segment filters is changed.
All behavioral and Date/Datetime based filters get rebuilt during nightly refresh. The nightly segment rebuild jobs for each segment are randomized for 6 hours. Jobs are executed anytime between midnight to 6 am with respect to the Default timezone set for the instance in Settings > Configurations > System Settings.
If a segment fails to rebuild for a predetermined length of time, Campaign Studio displays a notification alerting you of an error. For information on defining this time period, see segment settings.
The include/exclude operators with pipe-separated values are supported in the Text field types in segment filters. The values can also be pasted from the spreadsheet.
You can create dynamic segments by using date filters.
Note
The date format for values stored in the database is YYYY-MM-DD. For
example, December 11, 2020 is stored as 2020-12-11 and November
12, 2020 is stored as 2020-11-12. To update the display format for
dates, go to Settings > Configuration > System Settings >
System Defaults. However, this does not alter the format in which dates
are stored in the database.
You must ensure that you use the correct operator and time frame in order to build an effective segment.
Once you have selected a date field as your filter, such as the default Date last active field or a custom Birthday field, you will have a list of operators to choose from:
Equals: The value on the contact record exactly matches the filter value.
Not Equal: The value on the contact record is any value that does not match the filter value.
Greater than: The value on the contact record is at a later date in time than X date. For example, Greater than today means anytime from tomorrow until the end of time.
Greater than or equal: The value on the contact record is either at a later date in time than or including X date. For example, Greater than or equal today means anytime from today until the end of time.
Less than: The value on the contact record is at an earlier date in time than X date. For example, Less than today means anytime from the beginning of time until yesterday.
Less than or equal: The value on the contact record is at an earlier date in time than X date. For example, Less than or equal today means anytime from the beginning of time until today.
Empty: No value exists in the field on the contact record.
Not empty: A value exists in the field on the contact record.
Like: This operator is not supported in date or datetime fields, and must not be used.
Not like: This operator is not supported in date or datetime fields, and must not be used.
Regexp: Contacts with values that match the specified regular expression pattern are included in the segment. If you are not proficient with regular expression, do not use this operator.
Not regexp: Contacts with values that do not match the specified regular expression pattern are included in the segment. If you are not proficient with regular expressions, do not use this operator.
Starts with: Contacts whose field values begin with the specified numbers are included in the segment. These filter values should generally reference years (or years and months).
For example, a value of 19 matches any contacts whose field value has a year in the 1900s. A value of 200 matches contacts with a year value between 2000 and 2009 and a value of 2020-11 matches contacts with a field value in November 2020.
Ends with: Contacts whose field values end with the specified numbers are included in the segment. These filter values should generally reference days (or months and days).
For example, a value of 1 matches anyone whose field value is on the 1st, 11th, 21st, or 31st of any month but a value of 01 matches the 1st of a month. A value of 01-01 finds contacts whose value is for January 1 of any year.
Contains: Contacts with the specified filter value anywhere in the field value are included in the segment. Acquia does not recommend using this operator, as there are very few use cases for this data apart from potentially finding a somewhat random subset of contacts (without using Randomizer).
While using date filters, you may not want to reference a static date. Additionally, you may not want to update a date or date range regularly. Hence, Campaign Studio supports more dynamic date ranges, as listed below:
Note
For the examples on Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, and
Anniversary, assume that the operator is equals. Not equal,
greater than, greater than or equal, less than, and less than
or equal are all valid operators with these values.
Yesterday: The value on the contact record is exactly one day before today’s date. For example,
Today: The value on the contact record exactly matches today’s date, including the year. For example,
Tomorrow: The value on the contact record is one day after today’s date. For example,
Anniversary: The month and the day of today’s date match the month and day of the contact field value. For example,
Note
Weeks in Campaign Studio begin on Monday and end on Sunday, and week references match the previous, current, or next calendar week rather than the preceding, current, or following 7-day period. Similarly, months and years follow calendar months (January, February, 2020, 1) rather than a set period of days like 30 or 365.
Last/this/next week/month/year: Combinations of the indicator (last, this, and next) and time period (week, month, and year) can be used for very powerful dynamic segmentation. Combined with the various operators, these can mean different things.
+/- X minutes/hours/days/months/years: Rather than using a calendar period, you can determine a set period of time for your segment filters to match contact field values to. This uses the value for the minute, hour, day, month, or year column in the filter and add or subtract the number you use in the segment filter to match contact field values. Minutes and hours are only available for Date/Time fields.
To look for a date in the future, use a positive value with a number value and a time period. For example, 30 days matches contacts whose field value is 30 days in the future from today.
To look for a date in the past, use a negative value. For example, -30 days matches contacts whose field value is 30 days ago from today.
Note
A positive value does not require a + sign, but a negative value does require a - sign.
Combining these values with various operators can provide the most powerful date-based segmentation, but ensure that they are set up properly to work with the campaigns you want to run. The following examples contain various combinations of positive and negative values, but usage is not limited to these combinations.
Important
Keep the context and timing of events in the campaign in mind when using these filters. If you have a series of events over a span of time longer than the day contacts, enter the segment and campaign, ensure that the operators and values do not cause the contact to drop out of the campaign before all events have been triggered. This is particularly important when using minutes or hours. Acquia does not recommend using seconds.
Static and dynamic segments have more options on the right side of the Segment page.
On the Details tab, static and dynamic segments also have the option to display a different public name for a segment.
To view contacts in a specific segment, click View X contacts
from your segment list. Or, in the Contacts section of Campaign Studio,
enter segment:segment-alias in the search bar.
After the list of contacts loads, click the menu next to the Quick Add and
Add New buttons and then select Export to download a .csv file with
those contacts.
After saving your segment, the segment summary page displays a graphical summary of the segment growth, by number of contacts who are members of the segment.
The purple line shows how many contacts were added on a particular day. The green line shows the number of contacts removed from the segment. The orange line shows the total number of contacts in the segment.
If you change the timeframe on the graph to show growth over a longer period than 30 days, the intervals change from days to weeks. At greater than 100 days, the intervals change to months.
If you are using the branding function in Campaign Factory, the line for contacts added follow the color assigned as the primary color. The line for contacts removed follows the secondary color, and the total line follows the tertiary color.
On the right side of the segment summary page, you can see what other elements in your Campaign Studio instance the segment is used by. Click the number next to the item type to view the list of emails, campaigns, segments, reports, forms, or point triggers that use the segment. Usage may include the segment being a source for a segment email, campaign, report, segment membership filter or campaign condition, or an action to add or remove contacts to/from the segment.
This graph is helpful to see how contacts may be getting into or out of a segment, or what messages that segment is receiving. Be careful when making any changes to filters on the segment, particularly if a segment is used in a published campaign. Removing contacts from the segment based on filter changes removes them from the campaign. Adding contacts to the segment adds them to the campaign triggers events when the changes to the segment are saved.
When a user builds a segment that leverages other segments within it, the page with the segment details displays an additional tab. This tab allows you to see if you have used a segment multiple times within a single segment, and helps to avoid creating logical errors when composing segments together.
Note
The tab displays both ‘included’ and ‘excluded’ segments.
For example, if you create Segment A that uses Segment B as a filter but Segment B already uses Segment A as a filter, this will be highlighted in the Segment Dependencies tab.
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