Segment
A segment is a named group of contacts described by a rule rather than listed by hand: everyone who signed up this month, everyone on a particular plan, everyone who has not opened anything in a year. Because it is a rule, the membership is worked out when you ask for it, so a segment cannot quietly go stale.
At a glance
- Category
- Audience
- Defined by
- A rule over contact properties and topic subscriptions
- Resolved
- When a broadcast is sent, not when the segment is saved
- Used by
- Broadcasts, and by automation branches
- Cannot include
- Anyone on the suppression list
How it works
You describe the audience as conditions over the properties a contact carries and the topics they subscribe to, combined with the usual logical operators. Nothing is stored as a list of addresses. When a broadcast is sent, the rule is evaluated against the contacts as they are at that moment, the suppression list is applied, and what remains is the audience. Two sends of the same segment a month apart therefore reach different people, which is the intent.
Why it matters
A hand-built list is out of date the moment it is exported, and the drift is invisible: a contact who unsubscribed last week is still on the spreadsheet somebody is about to upload. A rule cannot drift, because it is evaluated fresh. It is also readable — a colleague can see who a campaign went to without opening a file — and it makes the awkward audiences easy, such as everyone who has been quiet for six months and should be mailed less. Because the rule is stored rather than its result, the same definition keeps working as the audience underneath it changes.
Example
A segment is defined as contacts whose plan property is pro and who subscribe to the product news topic. A broadcast addressed to it resolves to nine hundred and forty contacts, minus eleven suppressed addresses. Two weeks later a different broadcast to the same segment reaches nine hundred and sixty, because more accounts upgraded and three people unsubscribed. Nobody edited anything in between.
Common mistakes
- 01Exporting a segment to a spreadsheet and mailing from that, which discards every unsubscribe made since the export.
- 02Filtering on free-text properties, where four spellings of the same plan name silently exclude people.
- 03Building a segment that never excludes the inactive, so every campaign keeps mailing addresses that have not engaged in years.
- 04Writing a rule that silently matches nobody, which sends a campaign to an empty audience and reports it as a success.
In Rasket
Segments are filters over contact properties and topic subscriptions, and the membership is resolved when a broadcast is sent. Broadcasts
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
When is a segment's membership decided?
At send time. The rule is evaluated against the current contacts, so a person who matches the rule on the morning of the send is included even if they signed up that day.
Can a contact be in several segments?
Yes, and usually is. Segments are rules rather than folders, so membership overlaps freely and a contact can match any number of them.
How do I exclude people from a segment?
By adding a negative condition to the rule, such as excluding a property value or a topic subscription. Suppression is applied separately and always, on top of whatever the rule returns.
Last updated 16 September 2026.
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