Tags & Segments

Video by the ConvertKit Team

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In this video, we're going to be going over tags and segments, including the difference between the two as well as how ConvertKit organizes your subscribers. Overall, the first thing that's important to understand is that ConvertKit is subscriber based, not list-based like many other email marketing platforms on ConvertKit.
You have one list and each subscriber is only added and counted once. But from there you can organize your subscribers into different subgroups, like tags and segments. Your tags and segments are displayed on the sidebar of the subscribers page. And this is also where you can create new ones. For example, if you'd like to create a tag, you can just click the, create a tag link, give it a name, and then press save.
If you already have tags and segments, you can click on their names from the sidebar to view the list of subscribers in them, as far as what tags and segments are, and the difference between them. I like to think of segments as almost like folders of subscribers that are defined by certain criteria. And tags are one of the types of criteria that can define the criteria for a segment.
Here's an example that might help make this a little bit clearer, say that you're tracking, which subscribers have purchased from you with tags, and you have a tag for each of the products you're selling. Now, those tags are useful on their own, but you also might want to have a broader list of just subscribers who have purchased anything at all, regardless of which specific product it was.
That's where a segment can come in from the sidebar of the subscribers page, you can click, create a segment and then give your segment a name for your own reference. Then click add filter, subscribed to tag, and then select a tag that you use to track a purchase. So if I click save, now, this segment is just going to include the same subscribers that are already on this tag that I've selected.
So it's not really giving me any new information that I don't already know from the tag. But if I click into this filter again, I can add an additional tag. And now, since this segment is set to match any of the following than any subscriber who has either one of these tags will automatically be included in this segment.
And you can see that this number in the corner updates to show how many subscribers are currently included in your segment. So like I said, this segment is currently set to match any of the following, meaning that either one of these tags will satisfy the criteria for this segment. On the flip side, you can also use a segment to track who has not purchased anything from you yet by switching this dropdown to none, or you can use this to track who has purchased every single one, one of your offers in this case, it's not quite as simple.
Well, it's just selecting, matching all of the following because if you add tags to the same filter, it automatically separates them using an oral condition, meaning that the subscriber only needs to have either one of these tags to satisfy this filter. So, if you want to only include subscribers who have both of these tags first click into this filter and remove any extra tags so that this filter only includes one tag then at another separate filter for the other tag.
And repeat this for as many tags as you need. Finally, select matching all of the following from the dropdown. You can see that the word in between filters changes from or to, and when you do this, so now this segment only includes subscribers who have both of these tags. And with this setup, you can still toggle back to any or none as well.
And the totals should be the same as they were before when you're ready, press save. And then your segment will be available in the sidebar. One of the awesome things about segments is that they will automatically update to include or exclude subscribers who do and do not match the criteria without any additional maintenance on your part.
This also means that you can't manually add subscribers to segments because segments are automatically populated with subscribers who fit their criteria. You can manually remove a subscriber from a segment, which essentially blocks them from being included in that segment. Even if they match the criteria, this is done from their subscriber profile, which we'll cover in the next video.
You can both manually add and remove subscribers from tags. So if that's something you plan to be doing a lot of, for a certain group, you may want to consider using a tag to organize them instead of a segment. Hopefully that example from earlier helped to clarify how segments can organize your tags, but you're not just limited to organizing by tag.
There are a ton of different ways. You can organize your segments, including the form. Someone's signed up to their geographic location, original subscription date, custom fields, and more. And of course you can still use the all, any, or none settings. I covered earlier to further make a segment more or less specific as well as have separate filter groups.
I know this can be a little overwhelming, so let me go through another slightly more complicated example. Say you have a tag that keeps track of subscribers who have indicated an interest in photography and you sell an online course for photographers. Let me walk you through how to create a simple segment.
That includes all of the subscribers with the interest in photography tag, who do not have another tag that indicates they've purchased your photography course, just like before you can go ahead and create a new segment from the sidebar and give it a name that makes sense for you. Then I'm going to click add filter and select the interested in photography tag.
Now, what I want to do is exclude anyone in that tag who has already purchased my photography course so that they don't get included in this segment. So I'm actually going to click add filter group. And in this filter group, I'm going to select matching none of the following. Then just like above, I'm going to add the tag indicating that they've purchased the photography course.
So now this segment includes subscribers who do have the interested in photography tag, but do not have the purchase photography course tech. So this example demonstrates how you can have different filter groups with different settings to further define your segment. But let's take this one step further to title together.
You probably notice that up here, I have matching any of the following selected in this case, since there's only one tag here, it doesn't actually matter if I select any or all. But see, your course is actually specific on photography for bloggers. So you only want to target subscribers who have this interested in photography tag, and an interested in blogging tag.
To do this. I'm going to add my interested in blogging peg as a separate filter, then switch this filter group setting to matching all of the following. Instead, as you can see the word between the filters now changes from, or to end to reflect that the subscribers must have both tags to satisfy this criteria.
This segment now includes anyone who has both the interested in photography and interested in blogging pigs, but do not have the purchase photography course tag. One last thing to mention is that different filter groups are always added as an end condition. So both of these sets of criteria have to be true for a subscriber to be included in that, in this segment.
And that wraps up this topic for now.