Editing segmentations

Ellie_Boardman- · ‎04-26-2016

I have a few questions on segmentation and I’m not too sure if I’m over-complicating things.

I'm working on an industry nurture campaign and we’re staging our engagement programs over the next 12months+, scheduling certain industries by priority to identify initial targets, therefore my ‘master industry’ segment will be built upon and added to over time. The purchased data we're targeting isn't all yet synced to our Marketo instance otherwise I would build the complete industry segments now.

1. Are you able to edit approved segments which are currently used in assets for dynamic content?

- I believe if you create a ‘draft’ under this, you can then edit and approve. I presume you wouldn’t/shouldn’t then ‘unapprove’ the earlier version as it will be used in an existing program/email?

- My concern is due to the sheer volume of our segments and how granular we’re looking to be, I may end up with multiple sub-folders through having to regularly edit already existing, approved segments – is this the only work-around to edit segments?

2. Smart lists to future proof future industry targets

- Due to our granular approach, I have created a ‘master industry’ segmentation with relevant segments underneath (e.g. ‘Wholesale & retail). Within ‘wholesale and retail’ we’re then targeting different populations (e.g. ‘clothing’, ‘food’, ‘toys’, etc). Each of these are assigned an individual SIC code (5-digit number) which corresponds to the relevant industry

- As a result, I was planning on creating master industry smart lists for these to determine which segment they are, based on ‘SIC Code’, so in the future we can easily identify the sub-segments without having to find the relevant SIC code.

- Due to the volume, I thought this naming convention would be the best method to future proof in anticipation for future industry campaigns we may send (e.g. Smart list = ‘Whole of clothing & footwear’  filter = SIC Code = ‘12345’), so we can easily pull the relevant sub-segments into campaigns as needed. I’m not sure if I’m over-complicating this / if there is a better method but I’m hoping to future proof our segments as much as possible for ease in future campaigns.

Grégoire_Miche2 · ‎04-26-2016

Hi Ellie,

Yes, you can create a new draft of a segmentation. And yes, you do not need to unapprove the current version to do so. ONce the draft is created, you will be able to edit the segment themselves, their order and the filters of each of them. Once the draft is approved, the new segment definition will replace the previous one. If you have changed the segment names, you will have to edit the smart lists / smart campaigns. The segmentation screen has a "used by" tab that indicates where the segmentation is used.

Approving a draft on a large DB can take a while, since Marketo will have to recompute the segmentation for the whole DB

AKAIK, there is a limit of 20 segmentations in an instance and 100 segments in a segmentation. Meaning that it will not be possible to handle all the distinct 5 digits SIC codes in a segmentation.

At some point, if the segment definition needs to change too often, you may want to use smart lists instead, or even more likely, a combination of segments (for the higher levels) and smart lists (form the lower level).

-Greg

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