A BlueConic segment is a dynamic grouping of your customers or visitors characterized by a defined set of attributes, interests, behaviors, preferences, or demographic, psychographic, or technographic properties.
Dynamic customer segmentation
Customer segments in BlueConic are:
- Dynamic
- Multi-dimensional
- Real time
- Easy to set up or expand in the UI (no coding)
Known and anonymous users can be segmented with a single filter or a complex set of filters. So you can engage with your users at the right moment with a meaningful and relevant dialogue. Customers and users of your online channels can belong to multiple segments. For example, a single user might be included in the segments "under 35 years old," "interested in football," "referred by social media," and "read December newsletter."
How does dynamic real-time segmentation work in BlueConic?
Dynamic segmentation in BlueConic means that the latest updates of profile property values are used to determine if a visitor falls in a specific segment in real time. BlueConic segments are also multidimensional. You can filter on several attributes at once, for example, creating a multidimensional customer segment based on CLV (customer lifetime value), interests, age, demographics, and so on.
Learn more: Visit BlueConic University
See the Introduction to Segments video in BlueConic University.
How to view, organize, and manage dynamic customer segments
Select Segments from the BlueConic navigation bar to see a display of all existing segments for your BlueConic environment. You can use the search box to narrow the display by keyword, for example, to find segments related to subscribers. The "Times Used" column displays the count of the related items to a specific segment (like Dialogues or Insights). You can view the related items by clicking into a segment and expanding the sidebar to the right.
Note: The "Times Used" column will not count the profile properties used inside the segment, even though they will appear in the related items.
See "Object Navigation" for an in-depth discussion of navigating the display.
Building a customer segment in BlueConic
To build a customer segment in BlueConic, click Add Segment at the top of the Segments window. A new segment appears, and you can enter a name for the segment.
At the top of the screen you enter a name for the segment and next you can see the number of profiles it currently contains. When you first create a segment, and there are no restrictions in place yet, you see the total number of available profiles.
Note that you can also create a segment using the Segment Overlap Insight.
Profile properties available for segmentation
Note that when you create a BlueConic profile property, you can turn on or off a setting "Available for segmentation" that determines whether you can use profile property for filtering or defining a customer segment. See the article on Creating a profile property for details on setting up profile properties.
Editing segment metadata
The top area of the screen shows the segment's metadata. Here's where you enter a name for your segment. See Best practices for names and labels for tips on naming your segments and adding metadata such as labels and descriptions.
You can edit the following metadata:
- Favorite: You can mark the segment as one of your favorites. Click the star icon to favorite or unfavorite the segment.
- Labels: By adding labels to an object you can easily group related segments and make managing and retrieving objects easier. See labels for more information.
- Description: Add a short description of the segment and its purpose.
- Edit rights of the segment: Select the domain(s) to which a user must belong to in order to modify this segment. If more than one domain is selected, the user must belong to all domains in order to be able to modify this segment. If no domains are selected, any user can modify this segment. See Domain-based permission for more information.
To save screen space, you can hide or show the metadata by clicking the top separator line with the [-] or [+] icon on it.
You can now further specify your segment by selecting one or more conditions or filters. See Segment Filters.
Defining a Segment
Segments collect customers or visitors together based on the values stored in their profile properties and group properties. To create a new segment, you start by selecting conditions customers have to meet to be part of the segment. These conditions might be another segment, a privacy or consent marketing objective (such as an email opt-in), a profile property, or a group property.
If a matching profile property does not exist, you can create one. (Don't worry about picking the correct property, because it's easy to add or remove profile properties after your initial choice.)
BlueConic displays a list of most used profile properties and the list of all other profile properties. You can also search for a particular profile property by typing in the search box. This automatically filters both lists to the profile properties that match your search.
Once you have located the profile property that you want, select it to start building the segment.
To flesh out a segment, you can filter for specific profile property values. When you select a profile property, the values you can filter on display on the right side:
In this case, the filter displays a list of values found in profiles, ordered by the number of profiles that contain that specific value. You can even filter by another value if no profile contains it yet. Other types of profiles will display other filter information and allow you to filter on dates or numeric values. Read more on segment filters.
In the example above, we picked "mlb". Note, that as you restrict the values in the segment, its size is being updated at the top of the page.
Let's expand this segment by hovering over the blue area of the chosen profile property.
Two new buttons appear: "+ AND" and "+ OR".
Click on "+ AND" if you want the segment to match visitors that match both your first property filter AND your second property filter. You can also choose to set conditions for Objectives, such as privacy opt-in, email consent, etc.
Click on "+ OR" if you want the segment to match either your first property filter OR your second property filter.
In our case, we want to segment on visitors who like baseball AND are from Boston, so we click "+ AND". A pop-up window appears to select the next profile property we want to filter on:
In this case, we want to use the "City (All)" profile property of visitors, so we select that. As a result the segment overview is updated with the new profile property:
As you can see the target Objectives and the two profile properties "Favorite Sport" and "City (All)" are connected by "AND", meaning the segment combines the consent objectives with two profile property filters by requiring each of them.
Note that upon specifying the value "boston" the value of the segment at the top of the page updates to show the number of profiles in the entire segment, i.e. profiles with the correct consent values combined with Favorite Sport "mlb" and City (All) "boston". Also, the numbers that are being shown in the bars take the entire segment into account; there could very well be over 500,000 visitors with "boston" in their profile, but only 127,630 of them also meet the consent requirement and have "mlb" as favorite sport.
If you want to fold the filter information, click on close icon in the top right of the screen. You now see an overview of the segment definition:
On the left you see the objectives and profile properties with their connection (AND or OR) and the conditions set for each of them.
If you are content with the segment, you can now save the segment.
To expand the segment, hover over an objective or profile property and click "+ AND" or "+ OR". Or, to remove an objective or profile property, hover over it and click the "x" button that appears on the right of the profile property.
If you want to adjust a filter, click on the profile property or the conditions and the filter screen appears again.
Extending existing segments
You can also use the segment definition you just created to extend an existing segment. Select Extend existing segment in the upper right corner and choose existing segments to serve as the basis for the new segment conditions. Only profiles that are members of all the selected segments and meet the objective and profile property conditions are part of the new segment.
For details on filtering based on different conditions and how to configure them, see Segment Filters.
Modifying, copying, or deleting a segment
As with other BlueConic objects, a segment can be saved, copied, or deleted using the save button. See Save, Save As, and Delete for an in-depth discussion.
Creating an inverse segment
Sometimes it can be helpful to create an inverse segment, which is a new segment containing all the profiles not in the current segment. Select Create inverse from the Save drop-down menu to create a new inverse segment. It is named "Visitors not in segment [current segment name]."
Segmentation statistics
In the right-hand sidebar, the "number of profiles" widget displays statistics on this segment, showing the number of profiles in the selected segment over time.
Click on the graph in the sidebar widget to see a detailed view of the graph. The X axis represents the time period, and the Y axis represents the number of profiles that belong to the segment. If the line in the graph contains points that stand for individual days or months, hovering over it shows statistics for that period of time. For example:
Graph options for segmentation metrics
You can change the view of the line graph by adjusting the range of values that are shown as well as the time period. You can also export the values shown in the graph to inspect them in external applications.
Related items
In the right-hand sidebar, the Number of Profiles, Objectives, and Related items widgets are displayed. You can use Objectives the see which privacy or consent objectives are related to this segment or to add the segment to an objective.
The Related items widget shows the other objects in BlueConic that are directly related to the segment you are managing. Segments can have the following types of related items:
- Connections: The BlueConic connections that import or export profiles in this segment.
- Dashboards: The dashboards that show insights that measure or report data about this segment.
- Dialogues: The BlueConic dialogue interactions that use this segment on the Who-tab.
- Dialogue variants, or optimizers: The dialogue variants that use this segment on the Who-tab of a BlueConic dialogue.
- Lifecycles: The BlueConic Lifecycles that use this segment as part of the Lifecycle's entrance, stage, or exit criteria.
- Profile or group properties: The profile properties and group properties that this segment uses as a condition.