Build audiences and segments

A segment is a saved set of audience rules. It is resolved against current community data whenever a campaign, newsletter or manual automation uses it.

Start with the presets

Communications offers three common audiences:

• Everyone — the full active person roster, including members, day visitors and leads represented by active member records.
• Members only — people currently classified as members.
• Day visitors — people classified from temporary access such as day, weekly, monthly or session passes.

“Everyone” does not mean only paid members. Use Members only when that distinction matters.

Create a saved segment

Open Admin → Communications → Segments, name the audience and add rules. Rules can use current profile, membership, offering, activity and other supported community fields. Choose whether all rules must match or any one may match.

Keep the definition understandable. Several narrow All rules can reduce the result to zero; several broad Any rules can make it almost Everyone. Save and inspect the count before using it for a paid channel.

Counts are estimates of people, not deliveries

The segment count is calculated before a sender removes people who lack that channel or opted out, and before email-address suppression is applied where supported. The final queued and delivered numbers can therefore be lower. A person can also qualify at scheduling time and not at send time, or the reverse, because segments are dynamic.

Before deleting a segment, cancel or move every scheduled campaign and newsletter that uses it. Deletion clears their segment reference; the current send-time fallback treats a missing segment as Everyone, which can make a scheduled send much broader than intended.

The quick Overview lists the three presets and only the first four saved segments. The full Segments page remains the source for every saved audience; a segment missing from the quick row was not deleted.

For a one-off narrow broadcast, the composer can additionally filter by active access type or offering. That narrowing applies to that broadcast and does not rewrite the saved segment.