Create simple segments

📮

Your Friendly Automate looks a bit different? Click here for the older tutorial:

Create simple segments (Mautic 4)

Segments are one of the central hubs in Marketing Automation. They are the link between your contacts and the emails you send them.

Using segments, you can classify your contacts into groups with certain characteristics. Then you can send personalized emails to these groups according to their specific needs.

Later you can also use segments to launch campaigns tailored to this group. In this tutorial, we’ll focus on your first steps with segments: Create segments and send emails to your segments.

Your first segment: contacts with email addresses

In Friendly Automate, you have known and unknown contacts. Unknown contacts are website visitors from whom you have not yet received any personal data. They are only identified by their IP addresses.

Known contacts are visitors from whom you have received a name and email address. Of course, you can only send emails to these contacts. The first segment we create is therefore: Contacts with email addresses.

To do this, in Friendly Automate click on Segments on the left and then on “New” in the upper right corner.

You can now enter a name for your segment, for example “Contacts with email addresses”. If you think the name is not self-explanatory, you can briefly explain what this segment contains under “Description”. You can save your progress at any time using the button at the top right.

The “Alias” and “Public name” fields are automatically filled in when you save if you leave them empty. You can ignore the settings on the right for your first segments.

Now click on the next tab ”Filter“. Here you can set up one or more filters for your segment.

To ensure that this segment only contains contacts for whom you have an email address, select the “Email” option from the drop-down menu. Then select “not empty” as the condition.

You have now successfully created your segment! You can now save and close the segment using the button at the top right.

This will take you to the overview page for the segment. Scroll down to see all the contacts contained in the segment. It may take 1-2 minutes for the segment to be updated.

Segments are dynamic, by the way. This means that new contacts who meet the criteria for the segment are added automatically on an ongoing basis. And contacts that no longer meet the criteria are continuously removed.

📣 And leads without email addresses?

What about the leads who visit your website anonymously and who you therefore cannot reach via email or campaigns? Motivate these leads to get in touch with your company via focus items (pop-ups) or contact forms. You can easily create both with Friendly Automate.

You can find a tutorial for your first contact form here:

More segments

You can now create more segments to categorize your known contacts into meaningful groups for personalized content.

Here are some examples that are very simple to implement, but already give you first opportunities to reach your leads in a more personalized way. From there, there's no limit to your creativity – with a little imagination and knowledge of your company profile, you can target exactly the right customers with exactly the right message that's relevant to them.

Communicate in the right language

A simple but potentially important personalization is related to language. (Our company Friendly is based in quadrilingual Switzerland!) If you have the opportunity to address your leads in their preferred language, take advantage of it.

To do this, create a new segment as described above for example with the title “German language“. Switch to the “Filters” tab and first create the filter “Email” – “not empty” again.

Now create a second filter for the language. To do this, select “Preferred language” from the top drop-down menu and then “German” at the bottom, for example.

You can now save and close the segment.

📮 Send an email to your segment: To send an email to this segment, in Friendly Automate click on “Channels” on the left, then “Emails”, and then “New” in the top right.

A popup will open. Select “New Segment Email”:

On the right, you can now select the relevant contact segment to which the email should be sent.

Now you can select one of the existing templates or create a completely new email (for this we recommend the “Hello” template). You can then edit the email using the “Builder”. You can find instructions here:

But now let’s take a look at other possible segments.

Convince your most curious leads

Curious visitors are characterized by the fact that they have recently visited your website frequently, but without completing a purchase. You want to remove the last barriers to purchase for your curious visitors. For example, show them product reviews, explain the return policy or offer them free shipping for their first purchase.

Create a new segment as described above, for example with the title “Curious leads”. Switch to the “Filters” tab and first create the “Email” – “not empty” filter again.

Then create a second filter “Number of visited URLs”. This filter queries how many different URLs, i.e. subpages of your website, a lead has visited.

Select the condition “greater than” and a value that makes sense for your website to represent an interested lead. If you only sell one or two products or services, this value will be smaller than if you run a webshop with 200 different products.

Another way to measure high interest is via the “Has X browser sessions” filter. This filter reads out how often the lead has visited your website in total. Again, select “greater than” as a condition and a value that reflects an intensive interest in line with your offer.

Of course, you can also decide to use only one of the two filters “Visited any URL x times” and “Has X browser sessions”, depending on what suits your offer better.

Next, you can create a “Last active” filter. As a condition, select “greater than” and then the desired time value, for example “-30 days”. This means that all contacts that were active within the last 30 days will be included.

Finally, you want to clarify that your lead is not yet a customer of your company. To do this, select the filter “Stage” from the drop-down menu, select the condition “not equal” and the value “06 customer”. Then create a second filter “Stage” with the condition “not equal” and the value “07 Promoter”.

There is another simple way to query the customer status without phases or sales integration: Query whether the customer has already visited the order completed page of your website.

To do this, create a filter “Visited X URL” (X does not stand for the number, but for a specific URL). Select the condition “not like” and enter the part of the URL that uniquely identifies the order completed page of your website as the value.

You have now created all the filters you need to clarify that your lead has an email address, has visited your website recently and often and has not yet made a purchase. Now you can send your curious leads a personalized email as described above.

Reactivate cold leads and inactive customers

Another useful segment can be your cold leads, i.e. those who were interested in your brand or products a long time ago but have been inactive for a long time. It can make sense to offer special discounts or interesting information only to this group, which needs new motivation.

To do this, create a new segment as described above, for example with the title "Cold Leads”. Switch to the “Filters” tab and first create the “Email” – “not empty” filter again.

Then select “Last activity date” from the drop-down menu as the second filter. As a condition, select “less than” and then the desired time value, for example “-90 days”. This means that all contacts who have not been active for 90 days or longer will be recorded.

A similar segment concerns inactive customers. For this you would create the same filters as for the cold leads (email not empty and last active a long time ago), and you would ask whether the person is already a customer. To do this, select the filter “Stage” from the drop-down menu, select the condition “equal” and the value “06 customer”.

Or you can use the option described above again: You ask whether the customer has already visited the order-completed page of your website once.

To do this, create a filter “Visited X URL”, this time select the condition “contains” and as the value enter the part of the URL that uniquely identifies the order completed page of your website.

Save and close the segment. Now you can target cold leads and inactive customers with the message they need to renew their interest in your business.

Reward loyal customers

Retaining existing customers and motivating them to buy again is 5x cheaper than acquiring new customers (read our blog post on this). Reward the loyalty of your existing customers with special offers such as free gift wrapping, surprises, special bundles, quick reorder options or early access to new products.

To do this, create a new segment as described above, for example with the title “Loyal customers”. Switch to the “Filters” tab and first create the “Email” – “not empty” filter again.

You have several options for querying the customer status of your particularly engaged customers. On the one hand, you can query the stage of your customer. To do this, select the filter “Stage”, the condition “equal” and the value “07 Promoter”.

Another option is to filter customers based on lead scoring. To do this, select the filter “Points”, the condition “greater than” and a score that represents a particularly engaged customer in your lead scoring model.

Of course, you can also use the filters “Visited any URL x times” and “Has X browser sessions”.

If you want to map the purchasing behavior of your customers in more detail in Friendly Automate, you need an extended integration of your sales software with Friendly Automate. This integration is available from the Professional subscription of Friendly Automate. ☎️ Contact us, we will be happy to help you.

Address the interests of your visitors

Finally, send your leads personalized emails that match their interests. You have two simple filter options for this.

Create a new segment as described above, for example with the title “Interest in crime fiction”. Switch to the “Filters” tab and first create the “Email” – “not empty” filter again.

You can now ask for tags that you have assigned to your contacts according to their interests. To do this, create the filter “Tags” and then the condition “including”. Now you can select existing tags from the drop-down menu or add new tags (confirm new tags with Enter).

Another option is to evaluate whether your leads have visited a specific subpage on your website. For this option, select the filter “Visited X URL”. Select the condition “contains” and enter the part of the URL that uniquely identifies the subpage(s) in question as the value, for example “crime”.

You may want to use both options, but you want one or the other condition to apply. You can use the “or” link for this.

So far, we have linked all filters with “and”. With the “or” link, you must note the following: “or” refers to all preceding filters.

This means that if you connect the filter “Visited X URL” with the link “or” to the previous filters: The contact either has an email address and certain tags, or the contact has visited your website – but may not have provided an email address.

This means that you have to query the email address again after the “or” link:

Now you can write your leads a personalized email that matches their interests as described above.

Next steps

These simple segments are just the beginning. In particular, it’s worth looking at what specific information you collect about your leads according to your marketing strategy and capturing that information in segments. There are countless ways to create and link filters.

Next, you can not only send emails directly to your segments, but also use the segments as the basis of a campaign (a workflow). This allows you, for example, to send an email based on an identified area of interest, then evaluate whether your lead has opened the email and which links they have clicked on, in order to follow up with further actions accordingly.

Learn more about campaigns here: