While the Customer Overview is a great way to create segments, the Segment Mixer offers even more possible combinations, exclusions, and options for your segments!
To access the Segment Mixer, hover your cursor over the “Tools” icon in the left-hand navigation bar and select “Segment Mixer”
Pro-tip: Don’t see the segment mixer? Contact support@activitystream.com and we’ll enable it for you!
Once you’re in the Segment Mixer, you’ll see a few options to “Define Your Audience” - by Topic List, CSV, Saved Segments or mixes, and by other bits of data from inside your Activity Stream Platform.
If you’ve been using Activity Stream for a while, you may recognize some of these from the “Segment Builder” - the Segment Mixer gives them even more power!
Below all of these Audience Definitions, you’ll see an area for the definitions you’ve selected (which will probably be ‘0’ when you first go in!)
As you select your Audience Definitions from the top portion, the selected definitions will be added to the bottom.
Audience Definitions
Let’s walk through all of the Definitions currently in the Segment Mixer
Topic Lists
Your topic lists should look familiar from your Opt-In Management and Campaign Builder. These are all of the different topics that your email subscribers have the option of opting-in to receive. Maybe you have topics like “Jazz”, “Classical” and “Broadway” or “On-sale announcements”, “Low Ticket Alerts”, and “Weekly Newsletter”. Whatever topics you have, you can add those subscribers to your segment mix!
CSV File
This one’s pretty straightforward - you can upload any CSV file for use in a Segment Mix. The standard fields we’d expect to see in an upload are:
- Email (required)
- First Name
- Last Name
- Gender
- Phone
- City
- Country
- State
Additionally, any custom fields will be uploaded as well.
Once you drag-and-drop your CSV file in, you’ll be prompted to match the fields in the file with the fields in the system. Just drop and drop the columns to the appropriate field and click “Import”
Note that if the email addresses in the CSV are not within the database you should not select any marketing permissions.
Saved Segments
Did you make a segment in the Customer Overview that you want to combine with Topic subscribers and a CSV? This is the place to do it. Just click on “Saved Segments” to see a list of all of the segments you’ve created and saved.
This is a very powerful definition, as you could create a segment of Customers who meet certain purchasing criteria (local, like jazz, prefer weekends, etc.) and then combine it with a CSV upload list (maybe from a partner jazz organization) and anyone who signed up to receive “Jazz” emails.
Combining Segments
As you select different Audience Definitions, you’ll see them start to populate in the “Selections” section at the bottom of the Segment Mixer
On the left-hand side, you can see any of the segments you’ve added to the mix. On the right-hand side, you’ll see combination/exclusion options. These options relate to the statement before (the segment on the same row as the option) and the statement after (the segment on the row below the option) in determining how you want to combine the segments.
For example, in the screenshot above, we’ll first begin by looking for customer who meet both the criteria in the first and second row (since the first option is “And Also In”) - this means finding all customers who are listed in the CSV upload and who also are listed in the saved segment noted.
After that, we’ll look for anyone who has bought within a certain time period, regardless of their inclusion in the CSV file or Segment (since the next option is “Or In”), but not those who have bought the noted event in the last row (since the last option is “And Not It”).
The Segment Mixer is a powerful tool, and the logic statements can definitely been a little tricky. But once you master them, you’ll be able to create the exact segment you’re looking for to maximize your marketing spend!
And remember, if you want to bounce some ideas off of anyone about your segments, feel free to reach out to us at support@activitystream.com - we LOVE getting to talk about these types of strategies!