Overview

Creating Segments might seem a bit intimidating at first with the many filters and filter combinations available in Element451. To give you a better sense of how to use Segments, let's take a look at a couple of examples. 

On this page, we will go over how to put Segments together, using both common filters and some less common ones. When viewed together, the examples will provide insight into which students are interested in an institution and how a school might produce and send communications tailored specifically to those students. 

This first segment will simply pull all students who submitted an application for Fall 2020. We recommend following these steps in your own dashboard.

1. Go to People → People. 

2. Click the Add Filter button below the People header.
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3. In the filter list, scroll or search in the top bar for "Application Status" and select it. 

4. In the constraints, select the "is" operator and "Submitted" for the value. If we wanted to look for anyone who has submitted or completed an application, we could change the operator to "in" and select both values ("Started" and "Submitted"). For now, simply click Submit.

We can now see a list of all the students who have submitted an application, but we want to narrow it down to only students in a specific application term.

5. Click the Add Filter button and search for "Application Term." Similar to the previous filter, select the "is" operator and the term (or similar depending on your organization). Click Submit.

Notice that there is a small dropdown menu in the top left of your filters. The options here are "All" and "Any," and they serve a similar function as the "and" and "or" options in the previous version of segments. Use that dropdown menu to determine whether you want a student pulled in that Segment to meet All the filters or Any of them.

We can now save this segment for later use in other modules, including Communications and Exports. Just click Save as New Segment and choose a name for the Segment.

The following segment looks at people within a certain distance of a given location (a campus in this case) who have also answered a survey. Perhaps we sent out a survey to gauge interest in the school and want to see how many people within 100 miles of campus have responded in order to follow up with a new email campaign to those local students.

1. Navigate to People → People
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2. Click the Add Filter button below the People header.
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3. In the filter list, scroll or search in the top bar for "Address Location" and select it.

4. In the constraints, enter the address you would like to search based on. Google Maps will autocomplete the address. This filter will calculate the exact distance of the user's address from the given address.

5. Select "At Most" for the "Count" field and enter "100" in the value. This tells the filter to only return users who are within 100 miles of the given address. You could also change the measurement unit to kilometers in the Unit field.

6. Click Submit in the bottom right of the window.

Now, all of the students who appear on the page meet this address condition. Next, we will add the filter for users who answered a survey.
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7. Click the Add Filter button to add a second filter to this Segment.

8. In the filter list, select Activity as the Type and scroll or search in the top bar for Answered Survey. Select it.

9. This kind of filter has three sections. We'll complete them as follows:
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​Property: Property types include Survey, City, Site, and Browser, among other options. For this example, we have chosen the Survey property, used operator "is," and chosen the Value as the Survey we are interested in: "Survey of Clubs." This narrows down the Activity filter to people who have answered this particular survey. You can add multiple properties here.

​Number of Times: How many instances of the action must have occurred to return the user? In our case, we want anyone who has answered at least one survey. Choose "At Least" for the operator and enter "1" as the value.

When: In what date period must the action have occurred? We sent the survey at the beginning of December 2019 and would like to see anyone who answered within that month. Choose "Exact" for the date type and choose 12/1/19 and 12/31/19 for the start and end dates, respectively.
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10. Click Submit in the bottom right.

We have now set up both filters and know who lives close to campus and has expressed interest through a recent survey. We can save the Segment by clicking Save as New Segment to the right of the filters.

With the saved Segment, we can send personalized Communications specifically for this group, export a list of these students, assign labels and tasks, and much more.
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​After you've created a segment, learn how to access and manage them.