Segmentations Vs Smartlists

[Anonymous]

What's the advantage of creating a segmentation and then using them in your smart campaigns versus creating several smartlists to obtain the segmentations that you want?

[Amy_Lepre]

Another thing that segmentation gives you is improved system performance. Also, although you have to wait for the segmentations to be approved, once that is done - they are always updated. You don't have to wait for the system to run through a smart campaign each time. See Jep's presentation from Summit 2013 (the segmentation stuff is on page 29 of the PDF linked there).

[Anonymous]

I totally understand, it takes a while to approve those segments. 😞

I think it's a cleaner way to go about certain campaigns. Ex: I use territory segments for assignment rules.

Also, you can easily report on certain segmentations(http://community.marketo.com/MarketoTutorial?id=kA250000000Kz0w). And I am hopefully going to take advantage of the dynamic content and snippets soon so that's a biggy.

If you have time, I'd just try making a few segmentations and seei what you can do with them. I still use smart lists for a lot of stuff but I find segments helpful in different ways. There is a deep dive about segmentations too.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Kim! What's the disadvantage of using smartlists for big ideas? The reason I ask is because I don't want to have to depend on waiting for my segmentations to get approved every time I have to make a change to them.

[Anonymous]

I find it easier to use segments for big ideas - like territories and industries. Then, yes, you can use them as you would with smart lists but also you can use them for dynamic content in emails,etc.