Introducing segmentation: deliver relevant content every time

Flexible segmentation tools helping you target subscribers with relevant content are now available in all phpList Plus accounts. Segmentation is the practice of automatically grouping subscribers by their characteristics in order to identify who should receive what. The result is more appropriate, and therefore more interesting campaign content – and increased engagement.

A new ‘Segment’ tab that is now available in your campaign composer. On this tab you’ll find options to set rules to identify subscribers. You can create one or more conditions based on your subscriber data (such as sign up date) and/or attributes (such as gender and location). These will be used to search through the subscribers from the list that you have designated on the’ Lists’ tab to find subscribers which match. Don’t worry – subscribers which are blacklisted or unconfirmed, or on excluded lists will not be selected.

Segmentation makes it easy to avoid boring your subscribers with irrelevant content, such as messages about services they are not eligible for, already subscribe to, or have expressed disinterest in. It avoids the need to create many hyper-specific lists and manually update them, and decreases the likelihood of list unsubscriptions.

Example

You want to offer a student discount code for your store to Canadian subscribers aged 18 to 25. You have previously added subscriber attributes: one for country, and one for age, and built a sizable list with members of various ages and locations. To automatically target the right subscribers with your next campaign, you need only the following segmentation rules:

1. Country – is one of – Canada
2. Birthday – is after – 21 December 1993
3. Birthday – is before – 21 December 2000
4. Subscribers match – all – of the conditions

An unlimited number of rules can be used to target your audience ever more finely. Segmentation can be used to great effect with recurring campaigns to trigger messages when a new or existing subscriber meets particular criteria. This is especially true when segmentation is combined with the phpList API to update subscriber attributes based on behaviour such as enquiries or sales on your digital marketing or e-commerce websites.

Want to know how many subscribers would meet your segmentation conditions before you send it? Preview the total number of recipients by clicking the ‘Calculate’ button on the same tab. As well as the total count, the first 50 recipient addresses will be displayed, allowing you to check if the right subscribers have been identified if you wish.

In case you might reuse the same set of conditions for different campaigns, you can save the segment and assign a name for later use: simply click ‘Save segment’ (this will save the set of conditions, and not the group of subscribers that match these conditions on the current campaign, so the recipients may change over time).

For more information on possible uses of the conditions see the Segment plugin documentation. The Segment plugin is available for all Plus plans. Compare Plus with Standard features on the pricing page, or try out the $1 Plan which includes all features for a limited time.