Segmentation

For companies conducting email campaigns, it is common practice to segment contact lists and databases of clients, customers or prospects into common groups of individuals who possess common characteristics.

Segmentation is therefore useful for:

• Managing Campaigns sent to sub-lists within your master list of contacts
• Filtering your lists to adapt and target content to the audience, thereby improving engagement
• Targeting specific populations and individuals at different stages of their client life cycle for special promotions
• Maintaining and producing reports on demographic, behavioural and sales data of your contacts Segmentation represents an advanced feature of eFlyerMaker, and is based on the fields in your mailing list. It is good practice to plan ahead, create custom fields in your list that represent useful ways that you can sort your lists in the future to be able to send out more targeted campaigns.

Benefits

1. Targeting: Using segmentation helps you better target your audience with Newsletters specifically tailored to them.
   

2. Tracking: Your marketing department and your team can better track engagement and identify which segments of your contact list respond to which blasts of your campaign.
   

3. Follow-up Sales: The analytics from Newsletters and promotions of specific segments will inform you on how to improve engagement in future campaigns.
   

Your segments are accessible via the Lists menu.

The elements of the segment

Conditions

Conditions are the building blocks of your segments and there is no limit to how many conditions a segment can have. There are two kinds of conditions:

• Declarative: Based on the fields of your contact list.

• Behavioural: Based on the behaviour of your subscribers toward your campaigns.

Declarative

To create a declarative condition, you need to identifie 4 informations:

• Logical Operator:

  • Determines if your condition will be positive or negative
    Eg. Address subscribers who have this characteristic is positive.
    Address subscribers who do not have this characteristic is negative.

• Contact information:

  • The field of your contact list you want the segment to search into

• Operator:

  • The filter you want to use in that field. The operator is the sorting variable of how we will manipulate our selected field in the condition. there are 3 to 16 different kinds of possible operators depending on the type of data used.
    

• Value:

  • The value you want your segment to target. The value is the input of your contact information (field) which the operator will use to sort your contact list field of the current condition. It must match an existing input in the contact information fields of your contact list.

For Example: If you want to address all subscribers from the city of New-York:
- None would be the logical operator
- City would be the contact information
- Contains would be the operator
- New-York would be the value.
The condition will therefore sort by any contacts for whom their "City" field contains "New-York". But, if one of your contact has "NYC" instead of "New-York", he will not be part of the segment.

** Conditions are not case-sensitive **

Behavioural

To create a behavioural condition, you need to identifie 4 informations:

• Logical Operator:

  • Determines if your condition will be positive or negative
    Eg. Address subscribers who have reacted a certain way is positive.
    Address subscribers who did not react a certain way is negative.

• Campaign:

  • You can select a specific campaign or all campaigns

• Publication:

  • You can select a specific publication or all publications (The option will not appear if you chose a specific campaign)

• Operator:

  • The action or non-action you want to base your condition on. Mostly opens and clicks.

• Link or Timeframe:

  • If you need to specify a timeframe (Between this date and this date) or a specific link. (optional)

    • Selected param

      • If you specify a specific link, you can also specify among the parameters that have been inserted in this link. The best example would be your Goggle Analytics tags.

For example: If we chose,
- None as the logical operator
- Campaign_25 as the campaign
- Has clicked link as the operator
- http://www.eflyermaker.com/ as the link

The condition will therefore sort by any contacts who has clicked on the link http://www.eflyermaker.com/ in Campaign_25.
** Conditions are not case-sensitive **

Sub Condition

A sub condition is a condition you attach to another condition to either add details to the original condition or make that condition even more precise.

For example: If we want to address only the people of New-York who clicked on a specific link in our last campaign, this is what the condition could look like:

[City] is equal to New-York
 AND
  Has clicked http://www.eflyermaker.com/ in last_campaign

This way, the segment will look for everyone who has "New-York" in their "City" field "AND" will only keep those who "clicked" "http://www.eflyermaker.com/" in the "last_campaign".

More complex example Let's say we have a contest for people who are 18 years and older and is only meant for residents of Los Angeles and New-York. For some reason, we want to have a list of people who subscribed to that contest by clicking on its link in our last campaign. Here's what the condition would look like:

This way, the segment will look for everyone who has "NYC" "OR" "LA" in their "City" field "AND" has an integer "18" or above in the "Age" field "AND" "Has clicked" the link "http://www.eflyermaker.com/" in the last campaign "show_tickets".

You can add as many conditions and sub conditions as you want to make your segment as precise as you want.

Sub menu

Every time you add a condition, a sub menu becomes available.

• Edit Condition

  • to modify or correct your condition

• Remove condition

  • to delete a condition or a sub condition. Be aware that if you delete a condition, the sub conditions will remain until you delete those as well.

• Insert Declarative condition

  • To insert another Declarative condition at the same level. It's the same thing as clicking on the Add condition button

• Insert Declarative sub condition

  • To attach a Declarative sub condition to your condition

• Insert Behavioural condition

  • To insert another Behavioural condition at the same level. It's the same thing as clicking on the Add condition button

• Insert Behavioural sub condition

  • To attach a Behavioural sub condition to your condition

Create a Segment

To create a segment, go to Lists => Create segment

Step 1: Segment Information

1. Fill in the Name of your new segment (no spaces, no hyphens, no special characters)
   

2. Add a Description (internal use only, optional)
   

3. Select the Folder in which you’d like to save the segment
   

4. Click on Save and continue
   

Step 2: Select recipient source

1. Select the mailing list you would like to segment. Make sure the list has all the custom fields you would like to sort with in the future, in order to create more specified sub-lists (segments) of your database or master list of contacts.
   

2. Click on Save and Continue
   

Step 3: Segment conditions

Adding Conditions

1- Click Add condition
2- Select if its a Declarative condition or a Behavioural one

Declarative

• Select which Logical Operator (positive or negative) you want to use

• Select which contact information (field) of your list to use as a condition

• Select the operator

• Type in the Value.

• Click on Save.

• Click the sub menu or the Add condition button to add another condition
  

• Repeat all previous steps until all Declarative conditions are created

Behavioural

• Select which Logical Operator (positive or negative) you want to use

• Select a specific campaign or All

• Select a publication or All (Not displayed if you selected a specific campaign)

• Select the operator
  

• If you chose All campaigns, you'll have to type in a Value

• If you chose a specific campaign, you can click Save to simply use the action (opened, clicked, received, etc.) as a condition or you could select a timeframe for that action. You could also select a specific link that was clicked in your campaign to build your condition.

• Click Save once you're done

• Click the sub menu or the Add condition button to add another condition
  

• Repeat all previous steps until all behavioural conditions are created

3- Click Save and Continue when all your conditions are created.

Locking segments to a list

• On Step 3 of creating segments, notice by default the Allow use of the segment with the selected list only checkbox is checked.

• If this box is unchecked, on Step 4 you will be able to apply the segment to another list with identical fields and value in your database and see the results. Or when you Launch the Newsletter, you may also select a different list and segment on step 2.

Applying the segment to another list

It is possible to apply the segment to another list if you have not blocked them when you created the segment. However, the additional list needs to have the same fields and values which are used in the condition(s). This lock option on step 3 is chosen by default.
If you wish to use the segment on another similar list:

1. Go back to step 3 of your segment
   

2. Uncheck the list exclusivity box and click on Save and Continue
   

3. When you launch a Campaign, you will see the option to apply the segment to other lists. Verify that the new list you selected has the same field names and values the condition(s) uses in your segment.
   

Segment incompatibility

If you try to apply a segment to a contact list that do not have the required filed names or values, you may see this error message appear:
The selected list is not compatible with one or more segment's conditions.

Step 4: Segment results

The Step 4: Segment results displays a summary of the segment, including:
List Name: The name of the mailing list from which it is derived
Segment name: The name you specified for the current segment
Segment count: The number of contacts remaining after all conditions in the segment have been applied, and the number of contacts in the original mailing list.
Conditions: A summary of applied conditions of the segment. In [ ] brackets are the names of the fields of the list used.
List Members: The contacts directly targeted by the segment after the conditions have been applied. The column titles of the contact information fields are sortable by clicking on their name.

Exporting a segment result

Once you have created your segment, you may wish to export it to a CSV file where you can save it as an Excel file, and to save it in your marketing folder in your documents.

Navigating segments

When you are creating or managing segments, use the sub-menu to navigate backward if needed.

Manage segment

To manage your segments, click on Lists => Manage Segments

Available Actions:

• To modify a segment, click on its View & Edit action button.

• To launch a Campaign with the designated segment already applied, click on theCreate Campaign action button.

• To move a segment to another folder, click on the Move to… action button.

• To review a segment’s details, click on the Info action button.

• To delete a segment, click on the Delete action button.

You may quickly get the summary of a segment by clicking on the info action button in the Actions menu when you Manage segments.

Using a segment in a campaign

To launch a Campaign with an existing segment,

A) From anywhere in the interface:

1. Click on Lists => Manage segments

2. Click on the Create Campaign action button

B ) From Step 4: Segment results:

1. Scroll to the bottom of step 4 and click on the Launch Campaign email with this list button

Both ways will automatically attach the segment to the list and the list to the campaign.

C) From anywhere in the interface:

1. Click on Campaigns => Create

1. Type the Name, Subject, select a Publication, select a folder and click Save and continue
Don't forget to check the Include tracking tags for Google Analytics on all links box if you have Google Analytics.

2. Your contact list should already be highlighted in green with the segment identified in blue.

If you didn't use A or B above,

• Click on the contact list and click on the Select segment action button to select the segment you want to use

• A modal window will appear with a list of segments you have created for that list
• Click on the segment's name so it becomes green, meaning it was selected

• If you've made some changes to your contact list recently or simply added subscribers, don't forget to click on the Refresh count action button to make sure your segment count is up-to-date

• Click on the green Select button

• Click Save and continue

On step 3, create a message or choose an existing one.

On Step 4, you will see a summary of your selection.