A segment is a filter of your guest database that you can save and use for the targeting of your email campaigns or surface data for your own information. Segments can use different targeting criteria of various fields to narrow down the results from your database.
The different fields that you can use to create criteria, span from guest profile related fields like location, gender or subscription status to stay related fields like rate codes, stay dates, and room types etc…
For example, you can create a segment that targets all guests who live in California who has stayed in the last 2 years in a Deluxe King Suite if you want to send an email campaign to promote your newly renovated King Suites.
CREATING A SEGMENT
See also our 3 min video on Segments.
Navigate to the Guest & Segments tab and click on the “Guest Segments” button to display the Segments page. Click on the blue “Create Guest Segment” button on the right and a window will display. From here, you can name your segment and then begin choosing your criteria. In order to save a segment, it needs at the bare minimum, one line of criteria.
AND vs OR
You can have as many lines of criteria in your segment as you wish, but keep in mind that the operator between each of these lines of criteria is “AND.” In the previous example, your criteria would be looking for a guest whose location is in California AND have a stay within the last 2 years AND stayed in a Deluxe King Suite. A guest needs to meet all lines of criteria to qualify for the segment.
Note: Within each line of criteria, you can often select multiple variables. For example, you can have a line of criteria that says “Guest location is California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona. The operator between these locations is “OR.” This means that a guest needs to either live in California OR Oregon OR Washington OR Arizona. Predictably, as you add more lines of criteria, your segment count will drop as your search gets more specific.
UPDATE STATS
While you are creating your segment, at any time, you can click on “Update Stats” to do an immediate count so that you can see how many total members there are in that segment as well as how many are reachable by email. Each time you make a change to any of the criteria or add or remove any lines of criteria, you’ll be able the update the stats to see the most current count.
Once you are happy with your segment, you can click on “Create” so that your segment is saved. After you create a segment, you can click “View Details” to expand the view and you can examine the details of that segment of your guest database. See the screenshot below.
You’ll be able to see how many total people fall into that segment along with how many of those people are reachable by email. The details will also let you know the total lifetime spend of the members of the segment along with the average room spend per stay. Below those statistics, you’ll see a summary of the criteria used on the segment.
Guest Profiles In the right-hand portion of the window, you’ll see a searchable list of the members of your segment. You can click on any of these guests to display their guest profile page.
Export and Download On the far right-hand side, you’ll see that you have the ability to export the segment. A link for a downloadable .csv file will be sent to your email once it has completed generating.
Once a segment is saved, you can also now select it when you are creating an email campaign, or you can click on “Create Campaign” from within the segment to start the campaign creation workflow.
People in Segment vs Reachable by Email
An important item to note is the difference between the “people in segment” number and the “reachable by email” number. People in the segment simply refers to the total number of people who qualify for the segment by meeting all the lines of criteria. This counts people who are unsubscribed or have blank or invalid email addresses. Reachable by email refers to the number of people who would receive an email campaign if you used this segment as the targeting for your campaign. This number does not include a profile that has a blank or invalid email address as well as those who are unsubscribed.
Segmenting on Lead Times
Use the information in Database Insights to segment by lead time. This will allow targeting for guests who have booked last minute, or booked advanced purchase before.