Understanding Segments in Real-Time Journeys

Segments in real-time journeys are similar to the segments previously available in outbound marketing. They let you define the specific audience you want to reach based on information and behaviors stored in your system. When creating a new segment, start by giving it a name and selecting the target audience. In real-time journeys, your audience can be either:

• Contacts
• Leads

This means you can market directly to Leads without first associating them with Contacts.

Choose How to Build Your Audience

When building a segment, you have several options for defining who should be included. You can segment using:

• Attributes, such as demographic information
• Behavioral information, such as whether someone opened an email in the past month
• Existing segments
• Directly included Contacts or Leads
• Directly excluded Contacts or Leads

You can start building these conditions from the segment canvas or use the elements panel.

Understand Groups and Subgroups

Groups and subgroups help organize your segment logic. When you need to combine different types of filters, such as attribute data and behavioral data, you'll create separate groups for those filter types. If you're working with several attributes, you can either create separate groups or organize related conditions into subgroups. The important part is understanding how the logical operators connecting those groups and conditions affect your final audience.

Use AND to Narrow Your Audience

AND requires an audience member to satisfy both conditions. For example, suppose one condition requires a Contact to be active and another requires the Contact to have an email address. Using AND means Contacts must satisfy both requirements to become segment members. This narrows your audience. Two useful best practices are to make sure your audience members are active and that they have the appropriate channel information for the communication you intend to send. For an email journey, that means making sure Contacts or Leads have an email address.

Use OR to Expand Your Audience

OR requires an audience member to meet at least one of your conditions. Suppose you want to target customers in three cities:

• Minneapolis
• Milwaukee
• Chicago

Using OR includes people whose city is Minneapolis, Milwaukee, or Chicago. This expands the audience because a person doesn't need to satisfy every condition. Using AND in this example wouldn't make sense. It would require a person's city to be Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Chicago at the same time.

Use BUT NOT to Exclude Part of an Audience

BUT NOT lets you begin with one group of people and exclude members who meet another condition. It includes people who meet the criteria in the first group but not people who meet the criteria defined by the second group. Like AND, this narrows your audience, but it does so by specifically excluding people who would otherwise qualify.

Combine Conditions with Subgroups

Subgroups can make your segment structure more efficient when you're working with several related conditions. For example, you could build a segment that requires Contacts to:

• Be active
• Have an email address
• Be located in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, or Chicago

Within that structure, AND can establish that the Contact must be active and have an email address, while an OR subgroup can establish that the Contact can live in any one of the three cities. For relatively simple attribute-based filtering, separate groups and organized subgroups can sometimes produce the same result. The difference becomes more important as your segment grows more sophisticated and combines attributes, behaviors, existing segments, and additional conditions.

Use Query Assist as a Starting Point

Real-time segments also include Query Assist. Query Assist uses Copilot to help create segments from natural-language descriptions of the audience you want to reach. It can provide a convenient starting point, but you should carefully review the resulting query. More complicated requests may not always produce the segment logic you intended.

Choose Between Static and Dynamic Segments

The segment settings let you determine whether your segment should be static or dynamic. This provides flexibility over whether segment membership represents a defined audience or should continue responding to changes in the underlying data.

Consider Moving Outbound Segments to Real-Time

You don't necessarily need to recreate every outbound segment in real-time journeys immediately. However, gradually moving your segments can be beneficial. Real-time segmentation offers improved performance for larger audiences and more complex queries. It also supports capabilities that aren't available when continuing to rely on outbound segments. For example, you can use multiple real-time segments within a single journey. Outbound segments can't be used when you need multiple segments for a journey, and they can't be used with the segment designer's include-by-segment functionality.

Estimate Your Audience Before Going Live

Another useful improvement in the real-time segment designer is the ability to estimate your audience size. You can see an estimated number of segment members before making the segment live. Previously, with outbound marketing, you had to make the segment live before getting that information. This provides an opportunity to check whether your filters appear to be producing an audience of a reasonable size before you begin using the segment.

Preview Included Members

You can also view a sample of the members who would be included in your segment. Reviewing sample members provides another way to check your logic and make sure your conditions are selecting the type of audience you intended. Combined with the estimated member count, this gives you useful feedback while you're still designing the segment.

Build More Targeted Audiences in Real-Time Journeys

Real-time segments give you several ways to define increasingly targeted audiences. The key is understanding how your conditions work together:

• AND narrows an audience by requiring multiple conditions.
• OR expands an audience by allowing members to satisfy any of several conditions.
• BUT NOT removes people who meet specified exclusion criteria.
• Groups organize different types of filters.
• Subgroups help organize related conditions within those groups.

Once you understand that structure, you can combine attributes, behaviors, existing segments, inclusions, and exclusions to create audiences that reflect your marketing requirements. Features such as Query Assist, static and dynamic segments, estimated member counts, member previews, and support for multiple segments within journeys provide additional flexibility as you move your segmentation from outbound marketing into real-time journeys.