“Clients tagged wholesale who've opted in and bought in the last 90 days.” A segment saves an audience like that once, so you can aim a campaign at the right people without rebuilding the filter each time.
Build an audience from twelve axes
On the Segments tab of Campaigns, combine conditions across any of these:
- Tags: has, or doesn't have, a tag you've applied to contacts.
- Consent: a contact's opt-in state for the channel (opted in, opted out, and so on).
- Activity: has or hasn't done something, or done it within / not within a number of days.
- Industry: the industry on the customer's company, or the one you recorded in your own industry field on the contact. The words are yours: there is no fixed list to pick from.
- Lead status, lead score and lead grade: where a lead sits in qualification, and how it scored.
- Open deal value: the live pipeline for that customer, at least or at most an amount. Deals are counted in their own currency, never converted.
- Location: city, state or country from the customer's company.
- Company size and lead source.
- Contact role: whether the company has someone in a role at all: a facility manager, a safety officer, a compliance lead.
Save the combination with a name and reuse it whenever you launch.
Email, SMS or WhatsApp
An audience is now resolved for the channel you're sending on. An email audience is addressed by email, an SMS audience by phone, and a WhatsApp audience by the same number format WhatsApp itself uses, so someone you only have a mobile number for is reachable, and a WhatsApp opt-out recorded from a reply is seen no matter how the number is written on their record.
A contact with no address for that channel simply isn't in the audience. There is nothing to send to, and nothing to check consent against.
Say it differently to different segments
A template can carry content variants bound to a segment: for contacts in that segment, send this copy instead. One campaign, one set of results, but manufacturing and pharma read the wording written for them, and the two never drift apart the way two copied campaigns do.
If a contact matches several segments, the variant you ordered first wins, every time. A variant that leaves the subject blank keeps the template's subject. And the preview is produced by the same code that produces the send, so what you approve is what arrives.
Variants are managed over the API today (/v1/template-variants); an in-app editor is on the way. Existing templates are unaffected until you add one.
Merge fields fill in per person
{{first_name}}, {{business_name}}, {{sender_name}}, {{client_name}} and, for a payment chase, {{invoice_number}}, {{amount_due}}, {{days_overdue}}, {{due_date}} and {{pay_link}}. The invoice fields come from that person's oldest unpaid invoice, and the pay link is a UPI link for exactly the amount outstanding.
The last five work in a campaign, where Finocket looks up each recipient's invoice as it sends. They do not work when you write a single message to one person from the compose screen. There is no invoice in scope there, so the compose screen offers you only the first four.
If a field can't be filled for someone (you're chasing an invoice they don't have, say), that person is held back with a reason rather than sent a message with a gap in it. Anything else in curly braces that isn't a merge field is treated as your own text and left exactly as you typed it.
A segment selects, it doesn't send
A segment only chooses who's in the audience. It does not decide who actually gets a message. That call is made per contact, one at a time, by the same send checkpoint every campaign and sequence goes through. So if a contact who hasn't consented happens to fall inside a segment, they are blocked at send, not emailed. Putting someone in a segment can never talk past their consent, quiet hours or a suppression.
A broken filter sends to nobody
If a saved segment's filter can't be read, it resolves to an empty audience; it fails closed. A segment will never quietly fall back to “everyone”, so a mistake shrinks your reach instead of sending to your whole list.
Access & control
Segments are part of the email & sequences module. Owners and assistants create and edit them; every send they feed is still logged with its outcome (sent, queued, or blocked with the reason), exactly as it is for any campaign.
Related: Email, campaigns and consent, Email sequences.