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Manage your profiles, lists, and segments

Course overview
Lesson
4 min read

Build a segment in Klaviyo

Segments can help you increase the effectiveness of your marketing, as you target specific groups with personalized content. Learn how to create a 30-day engaged segment and use key features in the segment builder.

Drive better results from your marketing efforts

Segments are groups of people defined by a set of conditions (e.g., what they’ve done and properties about them). Unlike a list, which is a fixed group of subscribers, a segment will grow as new people meet the conditions you've set and shrink as people no longer meet them.

Once you create a segment, use it to:

  • Send targeted campaigns.
  • Trigger automated flows.
  • Analyze segment engagement.
  • Target your sign-up forms.
  • Target your advertisements (e.g., on Google and Meta Ads).

We recommend creating a segment of subscribers who have engaged with your content in the last 30 days. They are a great audience for your regular email newsletter or other ongoing communications. Let's run through how to build this.

Identify segment conditions

Segments are defined by a set of conditions like: demographics, purchase behavior, profile properties, and marketing engagement. You don't have to choose just one condition; rather, you can combine multiple to build the segment that best suits your needs.

Before you create your segments, plan out a strategy around how you will use them. Think about what defines your brand, products or services, ideal customer, and overall marketing goals. Let's run through some of your options while building:

Demographics

What it is:

Segments based on qualities such as, age, gender, occupation, education, income, and nationality.

Example:

A product that may be segmented based on demographics is a shaving set; in particular, this brand can benefit from targeting their content to a gender-specific segment. That way, they feature products that are relevant to each audience member.

Behaviors

What it is:

Segment your audience based on profile behaviors. A few examples include:

  • Actions taken on your website.
  • Online shopping habits.
  • Actions tracked across your integrations.
  • Engagement with your messages.

Example:

A cosmetic company expands their marketing reach to former VIPs. They create a segment of profiles with a high predicted CLV, but who have not shopped recently. This audience might need a targeted incentive to re-engage and become loyal shoppers once again.

Geographic location

What it is:

Build your segment based on a customers location, such as town, county, zip code, or country. When grouping different geographic segments, consider elements such as language, culture, and currency; each may change depending on the region you are targeting.

Example:

A business uses geographic segments to reach their audience in a specific city. They target profiles who live in Boston to announce a new store opening up in that city.

Characteristics

What it is:

Grouped customers based on their personality traits, values, interests, attitudes, lifestyles, and even predictive analytics about them. This is similar to demographic segment conditions, except your focus is more on mental and emotional attributes.

Example:

This brand recognizes the need to target individuals based on their unique interests and lifestyles. For instance, they create distinct content for a high-value shoppers segment versus a low-value shoppers segment using predictive analytics about their audience members.

Audience targeting based on high and low CLV segments.

Use key features in the segment builder

Customers appreciate receiving relevant and personalized content. Let's review how to use key features in the segment builder to create highly targeted, personalized, and relevant segments.

Match each segment builder feature to its correct description.
Feature
AND connector
OR connector
Filter
What it does
Refines an existing condition to target a more specific subset — for example, narrowing a purchase condition by product category or order value.
Expands your segment by including anyone who meets at least one of the specified conditions, resulting in a broader audience.
Narrows your segment by requiring all specified conditions to be met, resulting in a smaller, more focused audience.
Build a segment in Klaviyo