Segment or Filter

[Paul_Johnson]

Hey team,

I'm trying to better organize our Marketo instance. At our company, we work heavily on Sales verticals. We sell to Inside SMB, k12, Higher Education, Channel partners, etc.

As expected, one of my vital tasks is to ensure it's heavily regulated that emails don't get sent to the wrong vertical. Especially the direct sales vs. partners emails.

The question I have is if it would be smarter to continue doing what I have been doing and use smart lists on data in the system for a blast/nurture. OR should I make segments on these various verticals, and another on Customer / Non customer? Thanks for the help!

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

Segmentations have a nice advantage in you situation: the are a mathematical partition of the database, meaning that no lead can belong to 2 segments at the same time, event if you make a mistake. The only mistake you can make is that the lead ends up in the wrong segment (but that is true for smart lists as well).

Segmentations would also enhance your email insight reporting (enabling custom dimensions) and enable you to use dynamic content.

Another advantage of segmentations is that you can restrict the number of users who can edit them, unlike smart lists.

But you will never be able to force other users to use them...

Segmentations used to be much faster than smart lists, but it seems that this advantage will be quite reduced with Orion project.

But still, I would create 2 segmentations and then use them in smart lists if necessary.

And you may want to vote here:

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

PS: this thread belongs to the "products" section, I think.

-Greg

[David_Gaible]

Hi Paul Johnson​ - I'll build on the previous answer:

If your leads cannot be in multiple verticals, Segments are going to be enormously helpful. A lead can only be in one Segment at once, so you can target your sensitive messages using your pre-built Segments. Of course, you need to QA the Segments while you're building them, but once you do it once you don't have to do it again!

[Anonymous]

To add to the previous responses - there is a time commitment up front to building Segmentations, but once you have them, they'll save you time building out your smart lists. In addition to Verticals and Customer vs Non-Customers, you could also build an "Emailable" or "Marketable" vs "Non-Marketable" segment, to filter out those who can receive emails vs those who can't (unsubscribes, email invalids, black listed, any other filters your business wants to exclude). I found this extremely helpful in getting a better idea up front of the number of record who would actually be included in an email campaign.

[Kim_Allen]

Hi Paul,

I agree that this would be a good use for segmentations and would allow you for more consistency and a quicker pull of lists across users. It also gives you more flexibility in report and even dynamic content (one email to show different content to customers vs non-customers. This is also a good option for something like a preference center where customers may need different preference and communication options easily.

Kim

[Paul_Johnson]

Thank you everyone!