Segments & Lists

In order to stay relevant in today’s supercompetitive marketplace, brands need to become more customer-centric and deliver more personalized experiences. Forbes correctly predicts that 71% of customers feel frustrated when an experience is impersonal. While personalization has been a trend for over a decade now, templatized email marketing has evolved into dynamic and customized experiences, in the blink of an eye.

To that end, segmentation is the act of separating email lists based on personalized preferences. Email lists can help you make your customers feel as exclusive as they are! In addition, sorted email lists can also be the key to successful email campaigns.

“A small list that wants exactly what you're offering is better than a bigger list that isn't committed.” – Ramsay Leimenstoll

The CDP Plus segmentation functionality allows you to select specific subscribers with similar characteristics to create static or dynamic campaign lists within the Zeta Marketing Platform. With segmentation, you can keep off those subscribers from your list who do not even open your emails. Furthermore, this functionality gives you the opportunity to deliver highly relevant marketing messages to these specifically defined customer segments.

While Segments & Lists are both used to manage portions of your Audience and organize them into groups for activation and reporting, let’s take a quick look at what these two terms mean.

Segments are filtered portions of your audience updated by the platform, either in real-time or periodically as well as at the campaign send time, depending upon whether or not the Continuous Update option is enabled for the segment and also on the type of filters utilized in the segment. This is the recommended way of creating and managing chunks of your audience for campaigns and/or reporting.

Lists are static groups of individuals from your audience that can be used in campaigns. Common use cases for Lists include control groups and Return Path seed lists among others. Lists are not updated based on the initial filter criteria used to create them. Instead, users can be added to/removed from lists via the Experience Builder.

Management

Segment and List management is done from the Segments & Lists Summary screen. To start, click on the segment or list that needs to be changed in some way. A slider with additional options will appear on the right side of the screen.

Here, the segment name and description can be modified along with options to enable tracking for segments and to set messaging frequency restrictions.

Clicking on the people icon brings up a list of users in the segment or list.
Clicking on the paper (with a downward arrow) icon displays options for setting up an automated export of the segment or list, including options to push to Google’s Customer Match Audiences and Facebook’s Custom Audiences.

Split a Segment or List for Test Strategies

Users of the platform also have the ability to perform a random split of any customer Segment or List in ZMP by up to 10 parts in a single stretch.

Generating smaller lists from an audience Segment or List is an important step in designing campaign test strategies and ensuring that the test audience shares characteristics similar to the parent audience.

The split can be either based on counts or percentages and has to follow an automated naming convention for ease of use by adding a split

Click on the action menu (…) against a segment and select Generate List from the dropdown.