What is a Segment?
Segments are portions, or fragments of lists, whose members are based on some characteristic or criteria that each member must meet in order for that member to be included in the segment. Let's say you'd like to send a special message to only those list members who
- joined your list a week ago
- live in Canada
- are celebrating their birthday today
- have made a major purchase in the last year
- have an email address at a particular domain (e.g., aol.com or hotmail.com)
ListManager allows you to send to a segment, or subset, of your list who meet the criteria you define. Instead of sending to your entire list, you can use segments to filter exactly who should get a message based on whatever criteria you choose. These criteria are created by inserting one or more clauses into your segment. To see more information on inserting various types of clauses, see text, numeric, date, action, clickthrough, clickstream, purchaseinterest, and survey.
The segment is a statement about each member that must be true in order for that member to be included in that segment. Create a segment by inserting one or more clauses
For example, let's say you'd like to send a message only to those people on your list who work at "Company X", but you don't want to create a separate list for those people. By using the Segments: New Segment: Essentials page, you can create a segment which pulls all the members of the list with "example.com" in their email address. Click Create New Segment, and give your segment a name and a description. Then, specify you want to send to those email addresses with example.com in the domain by adding the following field:
Domain_ = example.com
To send to a segment, you may use the Mailings: New page to select the lists or subsets you'd like to send to, or you may send an email message to the segment address:
listname.segment@yourserver.example.com
For technical users: A segment is a subset, and is a user-defined SQL 'where' clause. It will be combined with the standard member retrieval 'where' clause in order to send to just a subset of the mailing list. More information about how to use your own SQL queries in ListManager may be found here. However, you don't need to understand SQL in order to use segments in ListManager.
Although you can create and use segments to find members using standard ListManager, sending to segments is a feature of ListManager Pro or Enterprise, and is unavailable for standard ListManager. Contact your account representative at sales@lyris.comif you'd like to upgrade to ListManager Pro or Enterprise.
Emailing to a Segment
Generally, users use the ListManager web interface to send to a segment. However, you may send an email message to a segment as well. The address is:
listname.segmentname@servername.example.com
Triggered Segments
Triggered segments contain trigger clauses, which specify a given date or event, that when it occurs, will cause a mailing to be automatically sent. The trigger clause(s) specify exactly when the mailing will be sent to the segment. For more information on triggered segments, see Segments: New Triggered Segment.