Build more targeted segments with groups and subgroups

Groups and subgroups in Customer Insights - Journeys let you combine multiple criteria to create more specific audiences. Instead of relying on a flat list of conditions, you can organize related criteria and give each group its own logical operator. This provides greater flexibility when you need to reach a very specific audience while excluding contacts who don't belong in a campaign. For this example, we'll build a segment for contacts who:

• Are active and have an email address
• Live in Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Iowa
• Have a completed order from at least six months ago
• Have not ordered again within the past six months
• Are not associated with a recent sales opportunity

Start with your standard audience filters

Begin with a blank segment and add any criteria you typically use across your marketing audiences. For example, you may want to include only contacts or leads who are active and have an email address. This helps give you a better understanding of how many people can actually receive your email. Your organization may have other standard requirements. If you're targeting leads and use lead scoring models, for example, you could limit the segment to leads that aren't yet marketing qualified. If you use the same collection of filters frequently, consider creating a separate segment containing those standard filters. You can then reuse it in new segments with an existing segment block instead of rebuilding the criteria each time.

Create a subgroup for multiple states

Suppose your first main group uses an AND operator. This means all the conditions in that group must be satisfied for a contact to qualify. We want our location requirement to work differently. A contact can live in Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Iowa. They don't need to match all three. Instead of adding the state criteria directly to the main group, create a subgroup and add the individual state conditions there. Set the subgroup's logical operator to OR. Your logic now effectively says:

• The contact is active
• AND the contact has an email address
• AND the contact lives in Minnesota OR Wisconsin OR Iowa

Only one state condition within the subgroup needs to be true. Once the subgroup passes, it acts as another satisfied condition within the larger AND group. If your data contains different state formats, you may also need to account for those variations. For example, records might contain Minnesota or MN, Wisconsin or WI, and Iowa or IA. Additional OR conditions can account for those variations.

Find contacts with older completed orders

Next, create another group to identify contacts who purchased from you in the past. Add an order condition where the status reason equals Complete. Then add a condition for the order's Created On date and configure it as:

• Is on or before
• Relative date
• Six months before today

At this point, the segment identifies active contacts with an email address in Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Iowa who have a completed order from at least six months ago. Depending on your organization's data model, the order's Created On date may not be the ideal value. If orders aren't normally completed close to their creation date, you could use a custom completed-date field instead. This would let you target contacts based on when their order was actually completed. You could also add criteria such as an order total threshold if that matters for your campaign.

Exclude contacts who ordered recently

Finding people with an older order isn't enough. A contact might have ordered more than six months ago and also made another purchase last week. Those contacts shouldn't be included in a campaign intended to re-engage customers who haven't purchased recently. Create another main group and add an order Created On condition for:

• Is after
• Relative date
• Six months ago

This new group identifies the contacts you don't want. Between the main groups, use the But Not logical operator. Although the new group selects contacts with recent orders, But Not removes those contacts from the overall segment. This approach is especially useful because the individual date condition doesn't provide a direct way to express "not after six months ago." By placing the opposite criteria in a separate group and connecting it with But Not, you can effectively create that exclusion.

Exclude contacts currently in the sales funnel

We also want to avoid sending this campaign to contacts who are already associated with a recent sales opportunity. Create another subgroup inside the exclusion group and add an opportunity status condition. Because the status is an option set, you can use Is In to select multiple statuses. In this example, select Open and Won. Then add another opportunity condition for Created On and configure it as:

• Is after
• Relative date
• Six months ago

Use an AND operator within this opportunity subgroup. The parent exclusion group should use OR. The overall exclusion group now identifies:

• Contacts with an order created within the past six months, OR
• Contacts with an Open or Won opportunity created within the past six months

Because this entire group is connected to the rest of the segment with But Not, those contacts are removed from your final audience.

Put the full segment together

The completed segment can be understood as three main pieces:

1. Group 1: Include active contacts with an email address who live in Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Iowa.
2. Group 2: Of those contacts, include people with a completed order created at least six months ago.
3. Group 3: Exclude anyone who has an order created within the past six months or an Open or Won opportunity created within the past six months.

Together, these conditions create a more focused audience of previous customers who may be appropriate for a re-engagement campaign without targeting people who recently purchased or are already moving through the sales process.

Add even more detail with nested subgroups

Subgroups can also contain additional subgroups, allowing you to create even more granular audience logic. For example, suppose living in one of the three states isn't specific enough. You could further restrict your audience based on county:

• Minnesota contacts must also be in Hennepin County
• Wisconsin contacts must also be in Milwaukee County
• Iowa contacts must also be in Des Moines County

Each state and county combination could use AND logic, while the larger geographic subgroup uses OR logic to allow any of the qualifying state-and-county combinations.

Use segment logic to refine your audience

Groups and subgroups give you the flexibility to turn complex targeting requirements into manageable pieces. You can nest subgroups to add more granular requirements, use AND and OR to control how conditions relate to one another, and use But Not to collect criteria for contacts you want to exclude. By combining these techniques, you can create more precise segments and focus your marketing messages on the people most appropriate for each campaign.