Overview

Your audience has a lot of information about your contacts. It may include what they do for a living, who they are and how they use your marketing content. Use this information to filter contacts into segments, and then send them targeted emails.

In this guide, you'll learn how segments work in Spreeflo.

Definitions

Segment: The term segment is used as a verb and a noun. To segment is to filter and divide similar contacts. The resulting list of contacts is also called a segment.

Conditions: The rules that determine how contacts are included in a segment.

Logic: The and/or variable that determines which conditions must be true for a contact to join a segment.

Subscribed contact: Someone who's opted in to receive your email marketing.

Unsubscribed contact: Someone who previously received your email marketing, but has opted out.

Non-subscribed contact: Someone who's interacted with your online store, but hasn't opted in to receive your email marketing.

Cleaned contact: Someone who's email address is considered invalid due to hard bounces, etc.

About segments

Segments are used to target contacts in your audience who share data. When you create a segment, you'll set conditions to filter contacts based on the information that's available in your audience.

Anyone can use the segment builder. Each segment with the segment builder can have unlimited conditions, with nested and/or logic operators.

Depending on the segment's condition AND or OR logic, a contact will or will not join a segment.

AND: This logic tells our system to show you contacts who meet all of your conditions.

OR: This logic tells our system to show you contacts who meet 1 or more of your conditions.

Where the segment builder appears

The same builder defines "which contacts" everywhere the product needs it. The categories, operators, time windows, and grouping rules are identical in each location:

Saved segments under Audience → Segments — reusable groups of contacts.
Criteria Match trigger — inline criteria, no saved segment needed.
Cyclic trigger — the criteria that filter who is processed at each tick.
If/Else process — the branching condition.
Multi-way Split process — each branch's condition.
Wait Condition action — the condition the journey waits for.
Custom Event trigger — property conditions only.

Rules and groups

A criteria definition is a tree of rules organized into groups:

Rule: a single condition (e.g. "Country is Germany").
Group: a collection of rules — and optionally other groups — joined by a single connector that applies to everything inside it: either AND (every item must match) or OR (any item may match).

The connector is set at the group level, not between individual rules. All siblings inside the same group share the same AND/OR.

Nesting AND and OR

Because a group can contain other groups, AND and OR can be combined to any depth by nesting. To express mixed logic, wrap part of the expression in a sub-group with its own connector. The builder represents this visually as indented blocks — a sub-group appears as a bordered section inside its parent, with its own AND/OR toggle.

Examples of what nesting unlocks:

(Country is Germany OR Country is Austria) AND tag contains "newsletter" — outer group AND, with an inner OR sub-group for the two country rules.
(Plan is Pro AND Total visits at least 5) OR (Plan is Free AND Custom event "upgrade_clicked" triggered at least 1 time) — outer group OR with two AND sub-groups, one per scenario.
Tag contains "vip" AND ((Email opened at least 3 times in the last 30 days) OR (Custom event "feature_used" triggered at least 1 time in the last 14 days)) — outer AND with one leaf rule and an OR sub-group containing two activity rules.

There is no fixed depth limit. In practice, anything more than two or three levels deep is usually a sign that a piece of the criteria should be saved as its own segment and referenced via a Segment Membership rule instead.

Filter categories

The builder offers the following filter categories. The category determines which fields and operators appear next.

Category	What it filters on
Contact Tags	Whether a contact has or doesn't have specific tags.
Contact Attributes	Built-in fields (first name, last name, email, website) and any custom attributes defined in the workspace.
Language	The contact's language preference.
Contact Added Date	When the contact was added to the audience.
Email Subscription Status	The contact's marketing-email subscription state.
Email Activity	Interactions with marketing emails (sent, opened, clicked, replied, with negations).
Web Push Activity	Interactions with web push notifications.
Segment Membership	Whether the contact is or isn't a member of another saved segment.
Total Visits	Total tracked website visits.
Time on Site	Total session duration on the website.
Visitor Identification	Whether the contact is identified or anonymous.
Page Visited	Specific pages the contact has visited (URL or page title).
Entry Page	The first page a session started on.
Link Clicked	Specific tracked links the contact has clicked.
Custom Events	Events received via the tracking API, optionally filtered by event properties.

Operators by input type

Operators depend on the data type of the field or attribute being filtered.

By data type

Data type	Applies to	Operators
Text	Text custom attributes, first/last name, email, website, page URL strings.	is, is not, contains, does not contain, starts with, ends with, is blank, is not blank
Number	Number custom attributes, frequency counts.	is, is not, greater than, less than, is blank, is not blank
Boolean	Boolean custom attributes.	is true, is false, is blank, is not blank
Timestamp	Timestamp custom attributes, contact added date.	is (exact date), is after, is before, is within (two dates), is blank, is not blank
Select	Dropdowns like language and subscription status.	is, is not

By category

Category	Operators
Tags	contact is tagged with (contains), contact is not tagged with (does not contain)
Email subscription status	is / is not one of: Subscribed, Unsubscribed, Non-subscribed, Cleaned
Visitor identification	is Anonymous (not linked to a contact) or Identified (linked to a contact record)
Segment membership	is member of segment, is not member of segment
Time on site	greater than / less than a number of seconds
Email Activity	opened, did not open, clicked, did not click, replied, did not reply, sent, was not sent — plus frequency and time window
Web Push Activity	sent, was not sent, delivered, did not deliver, clicked, did not click, dismissed, did not dismiss — plus frequency and time window

Frequency (activity-count rules)

Used for Email Activity, Web Push Activity, Total Visits, Page Visited, Entry Page, Link Clicked, and Custom Events: at least N times, at most N times, exactly N times, and has not triggered (custom events only — the event has never occurred for this contact).

URL / event-name / link matchers

When a rule needs to match a URL, an event name, or a link URL: any (matches any value), is, is not, contains, does not contain, starts with, ends with, regex match.

For Page Visited and Entry Page, page-title matchers are also available: webpage title is, webpage title is not, webpage title contains, webpage title does not contain.

Custom event property

Inside a Custom Event rule (or the Custom Event trigger with Add property conditions on), each property can be filtered using operators that depend on its data type:

Property type	Operators
String	is, is not, contains, does not contain, starts with, ends with, is set, is not set
Number	equals, not equals, greater than, less than, between, is set, is not set
Boolean	is true, is false, is set, is not set
Timestamp	equals, not equals, after, before, between, is set, is not set

Multiple property conditions can be combined with AND/OR.

Time windows

Activity-based filters (email, web push, website tracking, custom events) accept a time window:

Option	Behavior
over all time	No limit. This is the default.
in the last X	Units: days, weeks, months.
after	A specific date.
before	A specific date.
between	Two specific dates.

For Email Activity and Web Push Activity, the entire rule can be negated (is vs is not).

Built-in contact attributes

Every contact has these fields out of the box:

Field	Type	Notes
First Name	Text	—
Last Name	Text	—
Email Address	Text	—
Website	Text	—
Language	Select	Supports the full ISO 639-1 language set.
Email Subscription Status	Select	Subscribed / Unsubscribed / Non-subscribed / Cleaned.
Marketing Status	Select	Marketing / Non-marketing.
Contact Added Date	Timestamp	—

Custom attribute data types

Custom attributes (defined per workspace) can be of these types, each unlocking the operators listed above:

Type	Description
TEXT	String values.
NUMBER	Numeric values.
BOOLEAN	Yes/no.
TIMESTAMP	Date/time values.

Searchable pickers

Several rule inputs are backed by searchable, paginated dropdowns populated from your workspace data: tags, marketing emails (templates), web push notification templates, saved segments, tracked page URLs, tracked entry-page URLs, tracked link URLs, custom event names, custom event property names, and custom event property values.

Example criteria

A criteria definition reads as a stack of plain-English conditions. Some realistic examples:

Country is Germany AND tag contains newsletter.
(Total visits at least 3 in the last 30 days) OR (Email opened at least 2 times in the last 30 days).
Custom event purchase triggered at least 1 time over all time WHERE property amountgreater than 100 AND property category is electronics.
Email subscription status is Subscribed AND page visited URL contains /pricing at least 1 time in the last 7 days AND tag is not existing-customer.
Member of segment Trial users AND custom event feature_used has not triggered in the last 14 days.

Need Immediate Help? Contact our support team at support@spreeflo.com or check our other guides for more information.