Using Segments

Once you have created a segment, you can put it to work immediately as the audience of a campaign. This page covers how that works and how segments fit alongside lists and automations.

Selecting a segment as a campaign audience

When creating a campaign, the Audience step lets you choose who will receive the email: all contacts, a specific list, or a segment.

1. Create a new campaign via Campaigns > New Campaign and fill in the details step.
2. On the Audience step, choose Segment.
3. Select the segment from the dropdown. If you have no segments yet, there is a link to create one.
4. Continue to the email and review steps as usual, then send or schedule.

Only contacts with a status of Subscribed are ever included in a campaign send, regardless of segment rules. Contacts whose status is Unsubscribed, Bounced or Complained are excluded at send time even if they technically qualify for the segment. The campaign page shows the number of recipients actually queued.

Segments and automations

Automations are started by events — a contact being created, a tag being added, a contact joining a list, or a form being submitted — rather than by segment membership, so a segment cannot be used as an automation trigger. To branch an automation on contact data, use a Condition step, which tests the contact's status, tags, name, email or source.

If you want to reach everyone in a segment with an automated-style message, send a campaign to the segment: it is a one-off send, but it uses the same templates and merge tags.

Combining segments with other targeting

A campaign has exactly one audience: all contacts, one list, or one segment. There is no way to add several audiences to one campaign. (There IS a suppression list — see Suppressions — it is applied to every send automatically rather than chosen per campaign.) Some patterns that work within that:

• Two audiences — duplicate the campaign and send the copy to the second list or segment. A contact who is in both will receive the email twice, so make sure the audiences do not overlap.
• List members with an attribute — store the attribute as a custom field when the contact signs up (declare it on the form), then build a segment on the custom field. The segment covers the whole workspace, so add a rule on source or another field if you need to narrow it further.
• Exclusions — express the exclusion as a rule, for example custom_fields.plan does not equal customer, rather than as a separate suppression segment.

Keeping an eye on segment size

The Segments page lists your segments with a summary of their rules, how many rules each has and how many contacts it can reach today. Open a segment to watch that figure follow the rules as you change them, or call POST /api/v1/segments/{id}/preview from the API, which returns the current count and a sample of matching contacts.

SendBeam does not keep a history of segment sizes. If you want to track a segment over time, call the preview endpoint on a schedule and record the count yourself.