Segments

A segment is a saved audience: a set of conditions over your contacts plus any contacts you pin in or out by hand. A segment says which contacts belong together; a campaign says what happens to them. Membership is evaluated live, so a contact that starts matching (a new category, a reply, a bounce) is in the segment the next time anyone looks, with no rebuild step.

Segments live under Contacts > Segments, next to All contacts and Categories, and need the same permissions as contacts: View contacts to browse, Manage contacts to create, edit or delete.

Building a segment

The quickest start is from the contact list: set any filters in the bar above the list, then press Save as segment and the editor opens with those filters as conditions (free-text search and a campaign's lead status do not carry over; add a condition for them instead). Or start from scratch with New segment on the Segments tab.

Give the segment a name and a color, then add conditions. Each condition is a field, an operator and a value. Pick whether a contact must match all conditions or any of them. The drawer shows a live count of matching contacts as you edit, so you can see the effect of every change before saving.

Engagement counts add up every campaign the contact has been in. Opens count human opens only; automated fetches are ignored, the same way the campaign analytics report them. Text comparisons ignore case.

A segment can be built on other segments (In segment), up to five levels deep. A segment cannot reference itself or form a loop, and a segment that others depend on cannot be deleted until those references are removed.

A segment with no conditions is a manual list: it holds only the contacts you add by hand.

Adding and removing contacts by hand

Conditions decide membership, and two overrides sit on top of them:

• Add contacts on a segment page (or Segment in the selection bar of any contact list) pins contacts in. They stay members whatever the conditions say.
• Remove from segment in the selection bar of a segment's member list pins contacts out. They stay out even while the conditions still match them.

The segment header shows how many contacts are pinned in or out, and a Pinned contacts panel below it lists them; Back to automatic clears an override so the conditions decide again. A contact's own drawer has a Segments section that shows every segment, whether the contact is in it, and the same pin in, pin out and back-to-automatic controls.

New contact and Import on a segment page pin as well: a contact created or a file uploaded from inside a segment joins that segment, so it appears in the list you started from even when the conditions do not describe it yet. The import wizard names the segment in its header and confirms it on the result step, and rows it skipped as duplicates join too.

Sequences can pin too: the Add to segment and Remove from segment action steps apply the override to a contact as it moves through a campaign flow, so a positive reply can drop someone into a "warm" segment automatically. So can an import: the file import wizard's Add to segments picker on its Options step pins every contact in the file into the segments you choose, so a fresh list can land straight in the audience it was collected for. A Google Sheets sync source carries the same targets and re-applies them on every run, which is how a sheet you keep appending to keeps feeding one audience.

A segment with no conditions at all is a plain list: it holds exactly the contacts you pin in, so creating one and importing into it is the shortest way to turn a file into an audience.

Using a segment

• Browse: a segment page lists its current members with the same table, filters, detail drawer and bulk actions as the contacts page, including Select all matching so an action covers every member and not only the rows loaded so far, for selections up to 50,000 contacts.
• Add to campaign: enrols every current member as a lead of the campaign you pick, from the segment page or with From segment on a campaign's Leads tab. Contacts already in that campaign are skipped, and a running campaign wakes up to schedule the new leads. This is a snapshot: contacts who join the segment later are not added until you run it again. To keep a campaign fed automatically, link the segment instead.
• Link to campaign: attaches the segment to a campaign as a live audience, so contacts who join the segment later become leads on their own. See below.
• One-time email: send one message to the segment without building a sequence. Campaigns > New campaign > One-time email picks the segments, shows how many contacts they resolve to and how long the mailbox pool needs, and sends now or on a date. See one-time emails.
• Filter: the contact list's filter bar has a Segment pill, and the same scope carries into an export.
• Export: Export on a segment page downloads its members as CSV, XLSX or JSON, either every member, the ones matching the page's filters, or the selected rows.
• Duplicate: the segment menu copies a definition to start a variation from.
• Search and export: the contact search and export accept segment_ids, so anything that takes a contact filter can be scoped to a segment.

Linking a segment to a campaign

Where Add to campaign copies today's members once, a linked segment is a live audience: the campaign keeps enrolling whoever the segment says belongs. Manage the links from the Segments button on a campaign's Leads tab; a campaign can link up to 20 segments.

Linking enrols every current member as a lead immediately and turns on the campaign's Keep running for new leads setting, so the campaign waits for members instead of finishing when it runs out (turn it off in the campaign's preferences if you want it to finish). From then on, any contact who enters the segment, a new contact, an import, a condition edit, a manual pin-in, or simply drifting into a date or engagement condition, is enrolled automatically; a background check picks up drift about every 2 minutes.

The Leads tab shows every linked segment in a Linked segments strip: the segment's name, how many of its members are leads (120/120), a no contacts mark when it currently matches nobody, and a held out count when members were removed from the campaign by hand. Clicking a chip filters the list to that segment's leads; Add back re-enrols held-out members.

Enrolment is additive while the link is there. A contact who later falls out of the segment keeps their lead row and their progress; the link itself only ever adds. Removing a lead from the campaign by hand is respected too: automatic enrolment will not re-add that contact, even while they still match a linked segment, until you add them back yourself.

Detaching a segment is the exception, because the set of links is the audience: it takes the segment's leads back out of the campaign, so swapping one segment for another leaves the campaign with the new list rather than both. Three kinds of lead stay behind:

• anyone the campaign has already emailed, because the conversation has started; ending it mid-sequence is the explicit Remove from campaign on the Leads tab, not a side effect of editing the audience
• anyone who is still a member of a segment that stayed linked, so switching between overlapping segments never drops the overlap
• anyone added by hand: a contact you put in the campaign yourself, an Add to campaign from a segment, an import that named the campaign, or an automation

The dialog asks before a save that costs leads, and says afterwards how many were added, how many were removed, and how many stayed because they had already been emailed. Nothing is recorded as a hand-made removal, so re-linking the segment brings its members straight back.

The campaign reacts to growth by status:

• Active, including one waiting for leads: woken up to schedule the new leads straight away, or after the campaign's delay before the first email when it sets one. That delay counts from the moment the contact is enrolled as a lead, which for a linked segment is when the background check picks them up, not from when they joined the segment or when the campaign started. So someone the segment adds months later still gets the full wait from their own enrolment.
• Finished: restarted automatically, through the same launch checks as pressing play. A refused restart is noted in the campaign's activity log.
• Paused (or draft): the leads accumulate and send when the campaign runs.

A segment linked to a campaign cannot be deleted; detach it from the campaign first.

Segments in the API

Everything above can be driven from the API: list, create, update and delete segments, pin contacts in or out, look up a contact's segments, enrol a segment into a campaign once, and link segments to a campaign as a live audience. Contact search and export take segment_ids to scope any contact query to a segment, so an external system (a signup form, a CRM sync) can keep a segment current and let campaigns pick it up from there.

API calls address a segment by its ID. It is shown at the bottom of the segment page header (click it to copy), in the Copy segment ID entry of a segment's row menu on the Segments tab, and in every segment the API returns. Reads take the READ_CONTACTS key scope, writes WRITE_CONTACTS, and enrolling into a campaign WRITE_CAMPAIGNS.

Limits

• 200 segments per workspace
• 50 conditions per segment, 200 values per list condition
• 1,000 contacts per manual add or remove request

Where to go next