Organizing contacts with tags and segments

Tags are simple labels you apply to contacts — “Dog-Lovers”, “Paid-Members” — to organize them by interest, topic, or anything else. Segments are dynamic groups built from tags, profile fields, and behavior, which you can pick as the audience when scheduling a newsletter. For everything else on the Audience page, see Working in Audience.

Prefer to have it done for you?

Penpal can build segments and apply tags for you in conversation — for example, “build a segment of new signups” or “build a segment of everyone who opened in the last 30 days.” See how Penpal works.

Creating and applying tags

Create tags from Audience > Tags with the Create tag button — give each a name and a color. What a tag name can contain depends on how your account sends. If it sends through the company audience, names can use letters, numbers, spaces, hyphens, and underscores; Letterhead stores them in lowercase and turns spaces into hyphens, so VIP Guest List is saved as vip-guest-list. On a newsletter’s original audience page, tag names can’t contain spaces — use dashes instead (e.g. VIP-Guest-List).

Apply them:

• Individually — click a member’s row in your Audience table to open their full profile, then use the Tags panel there to search and select tags — no separate save step, changes apply as you make them.
• In bulk — on the Audience page, use the checkboxes to select individual members, or the header checkbox to select everyone on the current page (you can also check Select all to include members beyond the current page). Click + Add Tag, choose one or more existing tags — or type a new tag name to create it and include it — then click Add to apply to everyone selected. Bulk actions change many members at once, so review your selection before applying.
• By engagement — tag readers who opened or clicked a specific newsletter straight from its metrics page. See below.

Tag readers who opened or clicked a newsletter

You can apply or create tags for readers who engaged with a specific newsletter, directly from that newsletter’s metrics page — building engagement-based groups without switching views. The tag is added to those contacts in your audience right away.

Availability

This capability may need to be enabled for your account — contact support if you don’t see it.

1. Open the metrics page for any sent newsletter.
2. Use the tagging option in the engagement metrics to target readers who opened, clicked, or both.
3. Select an existing tag or create a new one, then apply it.

It’s handy for follow-up campaigns (tag everyone who clicked a product announcement, then send them a discount code), engagement scoring across multiple newsletters, comparing readers by which newsletter or variant they engaged with, and event reminders.

Creating segments

Segments group subscribers based on criteria such as tags, profile fields, and engagement. As you add and adjust rules, a running count shows how many contacts match — so you can tune the segment until it reaches the group you want, without saving first. The count covers every kind of rule — tags, profile details, engagement, location — and tells you plainly if it can’t be calculated just then, rather than showing a zero.

1. Go to Segments under the Audience menu and click Create segment.

2. Name the segment and choose how criteria are matched:

   • Any — subscribers match any of the criteria (OR logic), e.g. tagged Sports OR Fitness OR Gym.
   • All — subscribers must match all criteria (AND logic), e.g. tagged Sports AND custom field = Sports Enthusiast.

3. Click Add criteria to choose and add rules:

   • Tag conditions — choose in (has the tag) or not in (doesn’t) — and select one or more tags.
   • Profile field or custom field conditions — pick the field, choose an operator (such as equals to, before, or after), and enter the value.
   • Engagement conditions based on when someone last opened or last clicked — see Building a segment around a rolling time window below.
   • Subscription status conditions — choose Subscription status is or Subscription status is not, pick the newsletter, then select a status (Subscribed, Unsubscribed, or another status). Use this to build a segment that holds only readers of a particular newsletter — without it, the segment reflects your whole company audience.
   • Segment conditions — include or exclude another segment with Segment is or Segment is not.

   The lists you pick from — fields, tags, segments, and the values for a field with a fixed set of choices, such as interests — each have a search box at the top. Start typing to narrow a long list to the entries you want.

4. Click Save.

Segment counts aren’t real-time — they can take up to 3 hours to update after a segment is saved. You can still send to a segment right away; it includes the correct subscribers at the time of send.

Letterhead also builds engagement-based segments for you automatically, and you can chart how any saved segment engages over time against your whole-audience baseline. If your account sends through the company audience, you’ll also find Everyone but Ghosts (60 days), a system segment that includes readers who opened at least one newsletter in the last 60 days — useful for frequent senders who want a longer engagement window than the standard Everyone but Ghosts segment (which counts the last 10 issues sent).

Turn readers who engaged with a newsletter into a reusable segment

From an edition’s results page, you can turn readers who engaged into a reusable segment in one click — everyone who opened it, everyone who clicked a particular link, or everyone who picked a specific answer in one of its polls. Each becomes a real segment you can count, send to, and reuse. The segment always means everyone who engaged with that edition and refreshes each time you use it, so it’s never a frozen snapshot.

Poll-answer segments resolve to your contacts however the newsletter was sent — through Mailchimp, Iterable, SendGrid, Sailthru, Braze, Pardot, HubSpot, or any provider that identifies readers by email address. If a poll was sent only through a provider that shares no voter information, Letterhead tells you plainly when you try to build the segment, instead of quietly handing you an empty one.

It’s handy for follow-up campaigns (turn everyone who clicked a product announcement into a segment, then send them a discount code), comparing engagement across variants, and building lists around poll responses.

Building a segment around a rolling time window

When you build a segment condition on a date field — including Last Open Date, Last Click Date, or your own custom date fields — you can choose a rolling time window such as in the last or not in the last a number of days, instead of a fixed date. A rolling window keeps the segment current on its own: a segment like renewal date in the last 30 days always means the last 30 days relative to today, so you never have to come back and edit the date as time passes.

Where to find it: which options you see depends on how your account sends.

• Newsletters on the original audience builder: open the newsletter (channel), then go to Audience > Segments > Create segment. Under Profile Fields, add a condition on a date field, choose an operator, then switch the value type from Date range to Relative days and enter the number of days.
• Accounts that send through the company audience: you’ll find Last Open Date and Last Click Date under Legacy Profile Fields in the Create segment panel, along with any custom date fields you’ve created. Choose in the last or not in the last, then enter the number of days.

A few examples of what this makes easy:

• Recently engaged — everyone who opened in the last 30 days, for a high-intent send.
• Slipping away — subscribers who last opened more than 60 days ago, for a re-engagement campaign.
• Active clickers — everyone who clicked a link in the last 90 days, to reward your most engaged readers.

Segmenting by reader interests

Letterhead infers what topics each reader cares about from what they actually engage with, rather than from what they told you, and shows those interests on their contact profile.

To target them, add an interest criterion when you create a segment. Letterhead lists the interests your audience actually carries, most popular first, with a reader count for each, so you pick from real interests instead of typing one and hoping it exists.

Tagging and segmenting with Penpal

You can also ask Penpal to do this work in plain words. It works on your whole company audience, sends nothing, and always shows you what it’s about to change before it changes it.

• Look up a contact: “What do we have on [email protected]?” Penpal reads back their tags, fields, subscriptions and recent activity, and changes nothing.
• Tag a group: narrow it the way the Contacts screen does (a search, tags, newsletter and status, field values), paste an exact list of email addresses, or ask for a number: “Tag 100 Gmail contacts as warmup-day-1.”
• Create a segment from tags, tags to leave out, and an email provider: “Make a segment called Warm-up day 1 of everyone tagged warmup-day-1.”
• Plan a domain warm-up: “Plan a Gmail warm-up over five days: 100, 150, 250, 400, then 600.” Penpal creates a tag and a segment for each day, with no contact on two days.
• Remove a tag or set or clear a field across a group.
• Change a subscription status for one newsletter (subscribe, unsubscribe, not subscribed or disengaged), or delete contacts.

Before writing anything, Penpal tells you how many contacts it would change and waits for you to confirm in the same chat. For a delete you type that number back. A few limits keep a request from going further than you meant:

• A request covers at most 5,000 contacts at a time (25,000 across a warm-up plan), and subscription changes and deletes need at least one filter or an exact list.
• A filter Penpal doesn’t understand is refused rather than ignored.
• Field changes, status changes and deletes can’t be undone, so read the count before you confirm. Only subscribe people who’ve agreed to hear from you.
• Only company administrators can use these. Subscription changes and deletes are available only where the Contacts screen’s own bulk actions are on for you.

The same tagging, segment, warm-up and update actions work from a connected AI tool; looking up and deleting contacts are Penpal only. See how Penpal works.