Engagement Studio manual›Segments
Segments decide who receives your emails, campaigns and focus items. Instead of sending everyone the same message, you reach a specific group of members with communication that fits them.
Segments are built in your community, not in Engagement Studio
You create segments as user segments in your Community Management System (CMS). Your community knows far more about its members than Engagement Studio does: their profile, roles, group memberships and organisation. So the CMS is the best place to decide who is in or out of a segment.
- Dynamic: members enter and leave a segment automatically when their data changes. You never maintain a list by hand.
- Synced: tick Sync this segment to Engagement Studio on the segment, and it appears in Engagement Studio with the same name and the same members. Changes come through within about 5 minutes.
- One source of truth: the same segment can also control who sees content in your community and which focus item members get. Define it once, use it everywhere.
How the pieces fit together
| Where | What you do there |
|---|---|
| Your community (CMS) | Build the segment: who belongs to it, based on rules. |
| Engagement Studio | Use the synced segment in emails and campaigns, and design the focus items members see. |
Good to know: Engagement Studio also has a segment builder of its own, and segments made there exist only in Engagement Studio. Build your segments in your community. The one exception for now: segments based on activity (join date, last visit). Those rules are on the roadmap for your community; until then, build them in Engagement Studio. The segment recipes show both.
In this section
- Creating segments: build a user segment in your community and sync it to Engagement Studio.
- Segment recipes: ready-made examples for common goals.
- Reaching inactive users: how to approach members who haven't been active.
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