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A segment is a set of people with a purpose: “March webinar attendees”, “customers who bought last quarter”. A tag is a fact about one person. Both exist because collapsing them is how a tag list becomes sixty entries nobody dares delete. Open Segments from the Contacts page header.

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Two kinds

List

You choose who is in it — from Contacts, the Inbox, an import, an automation or a flow.

Filter

Membership is worked out from rules every time it is read, so it is never out of date.
The kind is chosen when you create the segment and cannot be changed afterwards. A filter has no membership list to keep, and a list has no rules to apply — so switching either way would throw something away.

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Creating one

1

Name it and pick a colour

The name has to be unique in the workspace. The colour is what you see on chips in the contact drawer and the Inbox sidebar.
2

Add a description

Optional, and only shown for a list segment — a filter segment describes itself with its rules.
3

Choose List or Filter

This is the permanent decision above.
4

For a filter, add rules

See below.
The manager lists every segment with its kind, its member count, and a one-line summary — the description for a list, the rules read out for a filter.

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Filter rules

A filter segment holds a set of rules and a match mode: all of the rules or any of the rules. is set and is empty take no value; every other operator needs one.
An unfinished rule is ignored, and a filter with no usable rules matches nobody.A rule with no value on an operator that needs one is dropped before the segment is resolved. The editor warns when that happens — “N unfinished rules are ignored when this segment is resolved” — and says so more loudly when nothing usable is left. An empty audience looks exactly like an empty audience, so this warning is the only thing standing between you and a campaign sent to nobody.
Custom fields appear in the rule list automatically once your workspace defines them.

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Putting contacts into a list segment

Several surfaces file somebody into a list segment, and each records how it happened — an automation adding ten thousand people is a visibly different fact from an operator ticking a box.
  • Contacts — tick rows and use Add to segment in the bulk bar.
  • The contact drawer — the Labels tab.
  • The Inbox contact panel — Edit beside Segments.
  • CSV import — Add everyone to a segment, which covers every row in the file including numbers you already had.
  • The Add to segment / Remove from segment automation steps.
  • The Segment contact flow node.
  • The public API.
Filter segments are shown in all of these but cannot be edited by hand — they work out their own members, and the picker says so rather than offering a control that would do nothing. Adding somebody who is already in the segment is a no-op, not an error. The confirmation reports how many were actually added.

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Using a segment

  • Filtering contacts — the Segments filter on the Contacts page.
  • Campaign audiences — pick several segments at once (the union of them), and exclude segments as well. “Everyone except last month’s buyers” is the shape most suppression lists take. Contacts who have opted out of marketing are left out whatever segment they are in. A campaign can also use Build a filter, which takes the same rules as a filter segment without saving one. See Campaigns.
  • Automations and flows — as a step or a node.
  • The public API — segments reuse the existing contacts scopes, so a key you already issued can use them.

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Deleting

Deleting a segment removes the segment and, for a list, its membership records. The contacts themselves are untouched.