Today we're launching the ability to save and reuse custom segments. And before I explain what those are, I have to share the trials and tribulations of naming this feature.
You've always been able to build and apply tag and metadata filters when sending an email or examining your audience — but simply calling this "filters" didn't quite feel right. Because then we'd have to distinguish between the filters we hand you by default, like premium subscribers, and the ones you set up yourself, like churning subscribers tagged high-value. And I bring that up as an example because there's genuinely no difference in functionality between the two. We haven't made filters any more or less powerful, or any more or less complicated. We've just added a way to save a filter so you don't have to spend quite as much time mucking around in the filter builder.
But none of the other nouns felt right either. "Audiences" felt a little prescriptive. "Saved filters" felt too gross. "Subscriber groups" added a bit of conceptual overhead: do I now have to assign a group to every subscriber when I create them? So we landed on the abstract and hitherto-untainted-by-prior-knowledge "segments," and we hope not to regret it.
As I mentioned up top, segments are more of a nicety than genuinely new functionality. There's nothing you can technically do today with a segment that you couldn't do yesterday. What they give you is a bit of unification: you no longer have to dig back through old emails or bounce between tabs to make sure you're sending to exactly the group you mean to. And crucially, they're available in the API, so if you'd like to manage them programmatically, you can.
Why ship segments now is a reasonable question. The honest answer is that three people asked me for them in the same week, which is the kind of thing I take as a sign from the gods — like seeing five ravens fly over a town's gate.
One note on availability: segments are only available on the $79/month plan and above. More than anything else, this is meant to reflect who they're useful for. If you balk at that price point, our mental model is that you probably don't need segments and are overcomplicating things. If you take umbrage with that statement, please do let me know — I'm genuinely curious to hear about your use case.
For the fuller picture of every way to slice your list — tags, metadata, paid versus free — see segmenting your audience.