Segments overview
Segments let you group your customers based on demographic, transactional, or behavioral attributes. You can use segments to target promotional campaigns, sales activities, and customer support actions to achieve your business goals.
Customer or contact profiles that match the filters of a segment definition are referred to as members of a segment. Some service limits apply.
Create a segment
Choose how to create a segment based on your target audience.
- Complex segments with segment builder: Build your own
- Simple segments with one operator: Quick segment
- AI-powered way to find similar customers: Similar customers
- AI-powered suggestions based on measures or attributes: Suggested segments based on measures
- Suggestions based on activities: Suggested segments based on customer activity
Manage existing segments
Go to the Segments page to view the segments you created, their status and state, and the last time the data was refreshed. You can sort the list of segments by any column or use the search box to find the segment you want to manage.
Tip
In B-to-B environments, the Audience Type column identifies whether a segment is based on accounts or contacts.
Select a segment to view available actions.
- View the segment details, including member count trend and a preview of segment members.
- Download the list of members as a .CSV file.
- Edit the segment to change its properties.
- Create duplicate of a segment. You can choose to edit its properties right away or save the duplicate.
- Refresh the segment to include the latest data.
- Activate or Deactivate the segment. Inactive segments won't get refreshed during a scheduled refresh and have the Status listed as Skipped, indicating that a refresh wasn't even attempted. Active segments are refreshed based on their type: static or dynamic.
- Make static or Make dynamic the segment type. Static segments must be refreshed manually. Dynamic segments are automatically refreshed during system refreshes.
- Find similar customers from the segment.
- Rename the segment.
- Tag to manage tags for the segment.
- Manage exports to see export-related segments and manage them. Learn more about exports.
- Delete the segment.
- Columns to customize the columns that display.
- Filter to filter on tags.
- Search name to search by segment name.
View segment details
On the Segments page, select a segment to view the processing history and segment members.
The upper part of the page includes a trend graph that visualizes changes in member count. Hover over data points to see the member count on a specific date. Change the time frame of the visualization.
The lower part contains a list of the segment members.
Note
Fields that appear in this list are based on the attributes of your segment's entities.
The list is a preview of the matching segment members and shows the first 100 records of your segment so that you can quickly evaluate it and review its definitions if needed. To see all matching records, select See more which opens the Entities page or export the segment.
Refresh segments
Segments can be refreshed on an automatic schedule or refreshed manually on demand. To manually refresh one or more segments, select them and choose Refresh.
To schedule an automatic refresh, go to Admin > System > Schedule. The following rules apply:
- All segments with the type Dynamic or Expansion will be automatically refreshed at the set cadence. Once the refresh is complete, the Status indicates if there were any issues in refreshing the segment. The Last refreshed shows a timestamp of the last successful refresh. If an error occurs, select the error to see details about what happened.
- Segments with the type Static won't be refreshed automatically. The Last refreshed shows a timestamp of the last time the static segment was run or refreshed manually.
Tip
There are statuses for tasks and processes. Most processes depend on other upstream processes, such as data sources and data profiling refreshes.
Select the status to open the Progress details pane and view the progress of the tasks. To cancel the job, select Cancel job at the bottom of the pane.
Under each task, you can select See details for more progress information, such as processing time, the last processing date, and any applicable errors and warnings associated with the task or process. Select the View system status at the bottom of the panel to see other processes in the system.
Export segments
Export segments to other apps to further use the data. Export a segment from the segments page or the exports page.
Go to the Segments page and select the segment you want to export.
Select Manage exports. The page Exports (preview) for segment opens. View all configured exports grouped by whether they contain the current segment or not.
To add the selected segment to an export, Edit the respective export to select the corresponding segment, then save. In environments for individual customers, select the export in the list and select Add segment to achieve the same outcome.
To create a new export with the selected segment, select Add export. For more information about creating exports, see Set up a new export.
Select Back to return to the main page for segments.
Track usage of a segment
If you use segments in apps which are based on the same Microsoft Dataverse organization that is connected with Customer Insights, you can track the usage of a segment. For Customer Insights segments used in customer journeys of Dynamics 365 Marketing, the system informs you about the usage of that segment.
When editing a segment that is being used within the Customer Insights environment, or in a customer journey in Marketing, a banner in the segment builder informs you about the dependencies. Inspect the dependency details directly from the banner or by selecting Usage in the segment builder.
The Segment usage pane shows the details about the usage of this segment in Dataverse-based apps. For segments used in customer journeys, you’ll find a link to inspect the journey in Marketing where this segment is used. If you have permissions to access the Marketing app, view more details there.
The system informs you about the usage of a tracked segment when you try to delete it. If the segment you're about to delete is used in a customer journey in Marketing, that journey will stop for all users in the segment. If the journey is part of a marketing campaign, the deletion will affect that campaign itself. However, you can still delete the segment despite the warnings.
Supported apps
Usage is currently tracked in the following Dataverse-based apps:
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