How we segment your visitors
Segmentation is at the heart of RightMessage. You can’t personalize content on your website without knowing a bit about the visitor – and we call this segmentation.
We segment visitors in three different ways:
1st / 3rd party data. This might be information you have about someone in your email platform / CRM (i.e. whether they’re a customer), or 3rd party data exposed from a product like Clearbit Reveal.
Behavioral signals. What pages has this person viewed? What ad campaign brought them first to your website? What kind of content are they most reading on your website?
Survey or quiz responses (Questions). Our Flow editor allows you to ask questions to visitors on your website. When a question is answered, a visitor is segmented accordingly.
A crash course on how RightMessage segments
Every visitor, on every interaction with your website, is profiled by RightMessage.
We track:
What pages they viewed, where they came from, what UTM parameters were used to visit pages on your website, etc.
What questions they've answered in your surveys and quizzes
What, if any, relationship they have with your email platform / CRM, and what data do you have about them
...and so much more.
All of this context is fed into our segmentation engine, which is where the magic happens.
Our segmentation engine is a bit like a rulebook.
For example, when someone views your pricing page at least once, then put them into the "Has Viewed Pricing Page" segment.
When a visitor is matched into this segment, you can do things like:
Sync this data up to your email platform so you can trigger an email campaign
Change existing content on your website
Show a targeted pop-up or question ("Why didn't you buy?") on other parts of your website
All of this would be possible because you'd set up triggers that are based on someone matching this segment.
This rulebook will stay the same as someone moves around your website, but the segmentation matching the visitor might change.
If you have a segment called "Currently Viewing The Homepage", a visitor would match when they're on your homepage, but wouldn't match this segment on any other page. Likewise, if someone's on your website anonymously on page view, after they opt-in to a lead generation form from there on out they'll now be segmented as a known contact in your email platform.
How we determine who's in what segment
All RightMessage segments are contained within Segment Groups or Questions. These are best thought of as categories (think: “Industries”, “Job Roles”, “Customer Status”, "Original Referrer") that sibling segments are housed within.
Only a single segment within each category can be matched at a time.
Our segmentation engine starts from the top and works its way down until it finds a segment that matches.
For example, in the below screenshot we want to determine what relationship a visitor has with us.
First, we check to see if they're a "User" – which we define by 1) they exist in our email platform and 2) they also have a value set for "user_id".
If the visitor doesn't match into this segment, we'll then check to see if they match into "Subscriber".
And if a visitor doesn't match any of your segments, they'll remain unsegmented.
But sometimes this isn't ideal. So it's sometimes important to ensure that your final segment serves as a catch-all. In the below example, someone will always match into one of these two segments, since you're either subscribed to an email list... or you're not.
What's the difference between a Segment Group and a Question?
Under the hood, Segment Groups and Questions are almost identical.
The only real difference is that Questions can be asked to your visitors within a Flow, and a visitor can self-select which segment they belong to by answering a multiple choice question.
Both can have auto-segmentation rules set up, and both can be synced bi-directionally to a custom field or property within your email platform. Both will appear in your statistics. And both are able to be used to route different people to different questions or outcomes in your Flows.
Next steps: get started segmenting your visitors
If you want to segment visitors automatically – i.e. based on the referring domain, data in your email platform, UTM parameters, a combination of answer data, or more...
👉 Here's everything you need to know on setting up Segment Groups
Or if you'd like to let visitors self-select into a segment via a question you include in a quiz, survey, or form...