Segmentation Models and Segments

A Segmentation Model divides your audience into mutually exclusive groups called segments. A customer will never qualify for more than one segment. If a customer meets the criteria for more than one segment, the customer is included in the first segment they qualify for. Every segmentation model automatically has a Leftovers segment except random equal size segments. This includes all customers who don't meet the criterion for any other segment in the model. This ensures that all customers targeted by the campaign's audience are included in exactly one segment. After defining your segments, you will define specific messages to be sent to customers that qualify for a particular segment.

Segmenting your campaign audience allows you to send different messages to the different segments. The segments are broken down for easy comparison in the Reporting module. You have the option to send the same message to all segments. In this case the segmentation serves solely as a reporting aide to compare the responses of different groups of customers.

You'll realize two benefits from the use of segmentation models in your campaigns. First, they enable you to target different messages to different groups of customers. Second, they'll allow you to break down reports on campaigns by segment, so you can measure and compare the behaviors of different segments. You can use a segmentation model even if you are sending the same message to the entire campaign audience.

With segmentation models you can break your audience by:

Customer Attributes – for example, you can use customer gender, home state, or favorite sport to identify segments.
Customer Behavior – for example, you can define a segment made up of customers who have clicked on at least one link in the messages you've sent to them in the past quarter.
Random Customer Segmentation – This allows you to do A/B testing, to see how random samples react to different messages.

To select an existing segmentation model or define a new segmentation model, click the Customers icon from any window within the application (It appears in the upper right part of the screen.) This will bring you to the main Customers page. From here, click Segmentation Model to go to the Segmentation Model List page.