Segments

A segment is a saved filter over the contacts in your workspace, such as “Customers on the Pro plan” or “Signed up in the last 30 days”. You don’t add people to a segment: everyone who matches its rules is in it, and nobody else. Use segments to send a campaign to part of your contacts, or to leave people out of one.

Who can use segments

During the alpha, segments are available to Emailit platform admins only. A workspace Admin role isn’t enough.

Campaigns and automations that already use a segment keep working for everyone in the workspace, and tracked segments keep updating.

How segments work

A segment has two parts:

• Source. Every contact in the workspace, or only the subscribers of the audiences you choose.
• Filters. Groups of rules on contact fields, custom fields, audience membership, tags and lead score, for example Email domain is acme.com, plan is any of pro, enterprise, or Tags has any of vip. Each group matches all or any of its rules, and the segment matches all or any of its groups. With no filters, everyone from the source is in the segment.

Emailit evaluates a segment each time it’s counted, listed or sent to, so it’s always current. A campaign scheduled for next week reaches whoever matches when it sends, and rules such as “created in the last 30 days” move with the date.

Who campaigns can reach

Each segment shows two counts: Contacts, everyone who matches, and Subscribed, the part that campaigns can send to. A contact is subscribed when it isn’t globally unsubscribed and is subscribed to at least one audience, any audience. Contacts that never joined an audience match segments but don’t receive campaigns. Suppressed addresses are still counted, and are skipped when the campaign sends.

The Subscription status field uses the same rule, so Subscription status is subscribed narrows a segment to the contacts campaigns can reach.

Create a segment

1. Go to Email Marketing›Segments and select Create segment.
2. Under Details, enter a Name and, if you like, a Description for your team.
3. Under Type, choose Segment or Tracked segment. You can’t change the type later. See Plain and tracked segments.
4. Under Contacts from, choose All contacts or Subscribers of specific audiences and pick the Audiences.
5. Under Filters, select Add condition and choose a field, an operator and a value. Use Add group for another group of conditions, and switch all and any to decide how conditions and groups combine.
6. Check the Preview: the number of Matching contacts, how many are subscribed, and the First matches. It updates as you edit.
7. Select Save segment.

You can also start a segment from other pages:

• Save as segment on the Contacts list turns the current list filters into a segment. Filters that segments don’t support are left out, and the editor lists them.
• Create segment in the menu of an audience page starts a segment with that audience as the source.
• Duplicate in a segment’s row menu copies it, as a new segment.

For the full list of fields, operators and values, see Create a segment in the API reference.

The segment page

Select a segment on Email Marketing›Segments to open it. The page shows the Contacts, Subscribed and Updated figures, the segment’s Definition, and the contacts who match right now, with search and filters. Contacts are listed live, so the list changes as contacts change.

From the header you can Edit the segment, Create campaign to start a campaign that sends to it, or Delete it from the menu.

Send a campaign to a segment

In the campaign’s Recipients step, pick one or more Segments, alone or together with Audiences. To leave people out, use Exclude audiences and Exclude segments. See Create a campaign.

• Evaluated at send time. Emailit works out the recipients when sending starts, so contacts who match by then are included and contacts who stopped matching are left out.
• One copy per address. A contact in several selected audiences and segments receives the campaign once.
• Exclusions win. A contact in an excluded audience or segment is skipped, even if it’s also in a selected one.
• Deleted exclusions stop the send. If a campaign excludes an audience or segment that no longer exists, Emailit doesn’t send it: sending returns an error, and a scheduled campaign goes back to Draft. Update its recipients, then send it again.

You can’t delete a segment while a scheduled or sending campaign uses it. Deleting a segment removes it from draft campaigns that send to it. Drafts that exclude it keep the exclusion and can’t send until you replace it, so the people you meant to leave out never receive them.

Plain and tracked segments

When you create a segment, you choose its type:

The type is fixed once the segment exists. To switch, create a new segment with the same rules. See Tracked segments.

Automations can also check any segment, tracked or not, in an If/Else Condition, a goal, a Wait until step or an exit condition: Segment is in VIP customers. See Condition (If/Else). A segment that an automation uses can’t be deleted until you change the automation.

Limits

Each plan includes a number of segments per workspace. Tracked and plain segments count toward the same limit.

The Segments list shows how many you’ve used, for example 3/10 used. When you reach the limit, Create segment and Duplicate are disabled until you delete a segment or upgrade your plan. The API returns 422 with the current usage:

{
  "error": "Pay as you go includes 3 segments.",
  "message": "Pay as you go includes 3 segments.",
  "usage": { "used": 3, "limit": 3 }
}

If you downgrade, your segments keep working, but you can’t add more until you’re under the new limit. On Pay as you go, tracked segments pause. See When tracking pauses.

A segment can have up to 10 groups and 50 rules, and draw from up to 100 audiences.

Use the API and MCP

The Segments API lets you create, retrieve, update, list and delete segments, list their contacts, preview a definition before saving it and list the fields rules can use. The API needs an API key with Full Access.

curl https://api.emailit.com/v2/segments \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $EMAILIT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Acme team",
    "conditions": { "rules": [{ "field": "email_domain", "operator": "equals", "value": "acme.com" }] }
  }'

To send a campaign to a segment, add { "segment_id": "seg_…" } to its recipients with Update a campaign, or { "segment_id": "seg_…", "exclude": true } to exclude it.

On the MCP server, the segments toolset has the same operations, so an AI assistant can build and check segments for you. See Toolsets.

Next steps