Help · Audience

Segments

A segment is a rule. You write the rule; who is in it follows from the rule, and stays current on its own. Nobody is ever put into a segment by hand, and nobody has to be taken out.

That is the whole idea, and it is what makes a segment different from a list. A list holds the people who were put in it. A segment holds whoever matches, this minute.

Your segments

The screen shows one flat table of every segment you have.

Search by name. Type more than one word and every one of them has to match, wherever each of them falls and in any order — searching Mother 2026 finds a segment called Mother's Day 2026 buyers. Filter by Label — labels are your own organizing words ("hygiene", "campaigns", "Q4"), added when you build or edit a segment. They are yours to invent; they are not Shopify's customer tags, which are a different thing and can be asked about in a rule.

Your search and your label filter live in the address, so drilling into a segment and coming back — with the browser's Back button or the breadcrumb — puts you back in the view you left. The address is also bookmarkable.

The columns are Name, People, and Last edited.

• People is the segment's count. Hover it to see when that number was counted, in your store's time zone. A segment nobody has counted yet shows a dash, never a zero — a zero would be a measurement that was never taken.
• Last edited is compact in the cell and whole on hover, in your store's time zone.

Two quiet marks can appear under a name. Built-in means the segment ships with the product; its rule and name stay fixed, because campaigns depend on what it means. Created outside the builder means the rule was written somewhere the builder cannot draw — it still works and still counts, but it cannot be edited on screen.

Paging. Under the table you choose how many to show at a time — 25, 50 or 100 per page — and step through with Previous and Next. The line beside them says where you are: Page 3 of 5. Type a number in the box to jump straight to a page. The page you are on is part of the address, so opening a segment and coming back puts you back where you were, and the size you choose is remembered the next time you open this screen. Searching or changing a filter takes you back to the first page. Very occasionally we cannot count your segments quickly enough to say how many pages there are; when that happens the line says Page 3 and nothing more, rather than guessing.

Create segment opens the builder.

The row menu

The three dots at the end of a row open its actions.

• Clone segment — makes a copy named "Copy of …" and opens it so you can rename it. The fastest way to try a variation without touching a rule that works.
• Pause emails… and Resume emails… — your reversible hold on the mail you send to these people. Marketers, managers and owners; see the pause and resume page.
• Delete segment — removes the segment. Built-in segments do not offer it; to stop using one, turn it off on Settings → Built-in segments.

Viewers do not see the menu at all.

Deleting a segment deletes the segment, and nothing else. The confirmation says so: only the segment is deleted — the people in it stay in your audience, and emails you have already sent are not affected. This cannot be undone. If any draft campaigns name the segment, they are listed too, because they will need a new audience.

It does not come back. The rule goes with the segment, so write down anything you want to keep before you press Delete — or use Clone first, which gives you a copy under a new name.

Anything you have already sent is untouched. A campaign that has gone out keeps its own record of who it went to and what rule chose them, and a campaign that is scheduled and locked in keeps the rule it was locked in with, so deleting a segment cannot change either of them.

A segment's own page

Open a segment to see four things.

What this rule says — the rule written out as plain sentences, the same prose the builder shows while you edit. If the rule was written outside the builder, or the segment is built-in, a line above says so and Edit is not offered.

Who this catches — the count, with the number of profiles it was measured against, and the moment it was counted, in your store's time zone. Refresh count re-measures it. If a refresh fails or the rule is too expensive to count right now, the card keeps the last number it honestly had and says what happened; the segment itself is unaffected and campaigns can still use it.

People in this segment — a preview of who matches right now, with a Show filter for Everyone, Paused only, or Not paused, and Show more people at the end. Paused people are included and marked; they are still members. If the rule is too expensive to preview, the preview says so, and the segment still counts and still sends.

About this segment — when it was created, when it was last edited, and its labels.

The top of the page carries this segment's acts as small marks — Refresh count, Add to a list, Edit and Export — and a ⋮ menu beside them that spells out every one of them in words, with Delete segment at the bottom. Press the name itself to rename the segment; a built-in keeps its name, so it is plain text there.

A segment with a rule left out

A segment that arrived in an import can have a rule missing, and sometimes more than one. It happens when the tool you came from held a rule this app has no way to ask — a distance from a postal code, say, or another tool's own predicted numbers. Rather than refusing the whole segment and leaving you to build it again from memory, the import keeps everything it could read and leaves those rules out.

A segment in that state says so above its rule:

A rule could not be imported:

then the rule in plain words, and every rule if there is more than one, written out one after another in the same line; and under it:

This segment cannot be used to send until you finish it. Change the rule and save — a changed rule clears this notice.

The same mark rides its row on this screen and the top of the builder, so you can see at a glance which ones are still waiting for you.

It cannot send until you finish it. A campaign cannot be armed with it, and its people cannot be added to a list. That is deliberate: a segment missing one of its rules is a wider audience than the one you wrote, and the safe place to stop is before the email goes out, not after.

Changing the rule clears it. Open the segment, put what is missing back in your own words, and save. The moment that change is saved the mark goes, and the segment sends like any other. It has to be a rule that changes — renaming the segment, or editing its labels, leaves the mark where it is.

Narrowing to something you know

A segment can be built from your own profile properties as well as from what people did — anyone whose skin type is sensitive — using the answers your forms and imports collected. The Profile properties page explains where they come from and how a rule over one behaves.

Where they are is a rule too. Pick a country, and — for the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom — one or more states or regions inside it, so anyone who is in New York, United States is a segment you can send to. A profile's location comes from your store's customer records where you have them and from onsite activity where you do not; a customer record always wins. Somebody you have never placed counts as not in the country, so is not in California keeps everyone whose location you have never seen. The Building a segment page covers the rest.

What a count promises, and what it does not

A count answers "how many people match this rule", measured at the moment shown. It is not a promise about a send.

Consent is checked again at send time, for every email you send. So is everything else that decides whether a person can be mailed. A segment of 12,000 people is not a claim that 12,000 emails will go out — it is a claim about who your people are. Segments are questions, never permission.

The base a segment is built from is your confirmed profiles — the ones with a verified identity. Profiles that are not confirmed yet are left out of every segment and every count, which the verified identity page explains.

The built-in segments

There are four built-in segments, and their names and rules are fixed, because campaigns depend on what they mean. Three of them read engagement, and the fourth, Suspected bots, is a hygiene rule. We add them to your store for you. You can turn any of them off, and add the fourth if we held it back, on Settings → Built-in segments — the settings glyph beside the question mark, at the top of your segments screen, opens it.

• Engaged 90d — anyone who opened or clicked one of your emails, or placed an order, in the last 90 days.
• Engaged 180d — the same question over 180 days. A wider net, and everyone in Engaged 90d is in it too.
• Lapsed 365d — everyone who received one of your marketing emails in the last 365 days and, in that time, did not open it and did not click it — and did not place an order either. Anyone who bought from you is never called lapsed.

That third one reads backwards to almost everyone arriving from another tool, which is why the app spells it out on the page as well as here. The reason all three of them ask about orders is the last section on this page.

Suspected bots

The fourth one is a hygiene rule rather than an engagement rule. It gathers the records that look like nobody at all — the fake signups every store collects — so you can look at them before you decide what to do about them. The name says suspected because the rule is a good guess, not a certainty. It was called "Probably not a person" until September 2026 — same rule, new name.

Somebody is in it only when all four of these are true.

• The record has no Shopify tags at all. Tags reach us from Shopify and nowhere else, so this means no tag has reached us for this record — which is usually because your store never wrote one. A record with an empty tag list and a record carrying no tag field at all both count, so nobody falls between the two halves of the rule.
• No email consent is recorded. Nobody ever asked them and they never agreed. That is not the same as unsubscribed; it is nothing at all.
• The record started a checkout at least once, ever.
• The record has never placed an order.

The tag row is the one doing the work. Somebody who really shops with you picks up a word from your store along the way, so a record no tag has ever reached us for, which got to a checkout and never bought, is usually not a person.

A real person can land in it, and you should expect a few. A browsing trail is strong evidence of a person; the absence of one is not evidence of a bot, and those are two different statements. Five ordinary ways somebody real ends up here:

• They declined tracking on your store, so the record of their visit never started.
• Their browser blocked it.
• You sent them an invoice or a draft order link, and they went straight to a checkout without browsing first.
• They browsed on their phone and checked out on their laptop.
• They have no customer record in Shopify at all — they reached a checkout without one ever being created — so no tag of yours has ever had anywhere to attach. (A profile that arrived with an email and nothing else is no longer a reason: we match those to your Shopify customer records by email address, and your tags follow.)

When you recognize somebody, vouch for them. Open their profile and press This is a person. They leave this segment and stay out of it, and the profile then shows who confirmed it and when. It changes nothing else: not their consent, and not whether you may email them.

Like the three above it, this one is built in, so its rule and its name stay fixed. Clone segment on the row menu gives you a copy of the rule that you can change, if you want your own version with more conditions in it.

If it is not on your list

The first row of that rule — no Shopify tags at all — only means what it says if your tag records here are reasonably complete. So we hold this one back when we have not found Shopify tags on at least half of your profiles: on a store whose tags have not reached us yet, that row would be true of nearly everybody, and the segment would fill up with your real customers.

When we have held it back, Settings → Built-in segments says so, and gives you Add. Pressing it is you telling us something we cannot see from here: that your tag records really are complete, or that you tag few people on purpose and want the segment anyway. It adds the segment exactly as written above — the same rule, the same fixed name — and then counts it. Nothing about any profile changes, and nobody is emailed.

A manager or the store owner can press it. Everyone else sees the state and the reason.

And, like every segment, it only ever holds profiles with a confirmed identity, because that is the base every segment is built from.

Two kinds of quiet, and why we keep them apart

There are two different questions that most email tools give one name to, and they come apart constantly.

Mailbox engagement — did this person open or click? This is what the mailbox providers watch. Sending to a lot of people who never open teaches Gmail and Outlook that your mail is unwanted, and everything you send after that has a harder time reaching an inbox. It is a fact about deliverability.

Customer activity — did this person visit, look at products, place an order? This is what your business runs on. It is a fact about value.

The same person can sit at opposite ends of the two. Plenty of good customers never open a marketing email: they see the subject line, come to the store directly, and buy. Your mailbox provider counts them as silent. Your bank does not.

The standard advice — sunset anyone who has not opened in a year — treats those two as one thing, and stops mailing people who are still spending money in order to protect a metric about people who are not. That is a real trade, and it should be yours to make deliberately rather than one a tool makes for you quietly.

So the built-in segments here read both signals. A purchase counts. That is why all three tiers ask about orders, and why nobody who bought from you in the window ends up in Lapsed 365d.

If you build your own version of this, do the same: an Email activity condition on its own answers "did the mailbox respond?", and that is not the same question as "is this still a customer?". Pair it with an order condition and you will be asking the one you meant.