About Pre-Built Segments

After you've sent a few campaigns in Mailchimp, it won't be long before you've got lots of cool data to work with. Segments are a great way to use that data to send targeted campaigns to contacts who have something in common.

If you're new to segments, or want a shortcut to targeted sending, Mailchimp offers a selection of pre-built segments based on campaign activity, purchase history, and other valuable information.

In this article, you'll learn about pre-built segments and how to use them.

Definitions

Before we go into more detail, let's go over some terms we use when we talk about pre-built segments.

Contact
Someone whose information is stored in your account.

Subscriber
A contact who has signed up to receive emails from you. Also known as a subscribed contact.

Segment
A section of your audience that includes contacts with common field information.

Pre-built segment
An automatically generated segment based on contact information or activity.

Campaign builder
The part of Mailchimp you'll use to create, design, and send an email campaign. The campaign builder has different sections where you'll choose recipients, set up campaign information, choose a template, add content, and send or schedule delivery.

Ad builder
The part of Mailchimp you'll use to create a social media ad campaign. The ad builder has different sections where you'll choose an audience, add content, and schedule your ad.

Predicted demographics
A Mailchimp Premium feature that uses data science to predict the gender and age of your contacts. To learn more, check out About Predicted Demographics.

How pre-built segments work

When a contact's traits or behaviors match certain conditions, like how much time has passed since they last opened one of your campaigns, we automatically add them to a pre-built segment of similar contacts.

For example, if you have a subscribed contact who's opened at least one of your recent email campaigns, we'll place them in Active Subscribers. Meanwhile, a subscribed contact who hasn't opened any of your last five campaigns will end up in Inactive Subscribers. Pretty neat, right?

If none of our pre-built segments work for you, use them as inspiration to build your own custom segments. To illustrate, let's consider that Inactive Subscribers segment. If five missed campaigns in a row doesn't match your standard of inactivity, you might want to create a new segment defined by a higher or lower number of unopened campaigns.

Getting Started with Segments
Create and Send to a Segment
All the Segmenting Options

Types of pre-built segments

Some pre-built segments are located on the audience dashboard, while others are located in the Segment drop-down for different campaign builders.

On the audience dashboard

Your Mailchimp audience includes a dashboard with clickable insights about your audience, so you can quickly launch campaigns for specific segments. Depending on the type of plan you have and the data in your audience, you'll find pre-built segments based on signup source, location, email marketing engagement, customer lifetime value, likelihood to purchase again, predicted demographics, and other valuable information.

To learn more, read About the Audience Dashboard.

In the campaign builder

Pre-built segments in the campaign builder fall into three different categories.

• Subscriber Engagement
• Customer Behavior
• Demographics

Subscriber engagement

Subscriber Engagement segments are available to all Mailchimp users. These segments are based on the date subscribers sign up for your emails, as well as how they interact (or don't interact) with your campaigns.

Customer behavior

Customer Behavior segments require that you have API 3.0 e-commerce data in your account. This data can come from integrations like Mailchimp for Magento, Mailchimp for BigCommerce, and custom API 3.0 integrations.

Demographics

Demographics segments are based on data from our predicted demographics feature. This feature is available with Mailchimp Standard or higher and Mailchimp Pro, as well as legacy paid users with a connected online store.

What you can do with pre-built segments

We designed our pre-built segments to help you quickly find the right recipients for your campaigns. For example, you might want to use the pre-built segment New Subscribers to send a friendly welcome series to people who recently signed up for your email marketing.

Here are some other ways you might use pre-built segments.

• Welcome new subscribers with an onboarding automation.
• Send repeat customers a promotional campaign with a special reward or discount.
• Target contacts age 35-44 with a promotional campaign for a specific product.
• Create an Instagram or Facebook ad for contacts in a top location shown on your audience dashboard.