What’s in a segment?

In Watson™ Marketing Insights, a segment selects a group of individuals that share specific attributes and behaviors. Members of the segment can share the attributes that are defined by an insight or by one or more attributes that you manually specify as conditions.

When you build a segment based on an insight, the segment includes individuals who share the characteristics defined by the insight. For example, if you create a segment based on an insight that indicates 30% of your customers are likely to disengage from your email communications, the segment contains identifiers for the specific individuals seen to be at risk of disengagement.

When you build a segment from scratch, you decide who to include in the segment. You can choose from a variety of behavioral, transactional, and demographic attributes that become conditions under which an individual is added to the segment. For example, you might specify age range, location, and account status as conditions. You can even use membership in another segment as a condition for being added to a segment. Individuals who match the conditions that you set are added to the segment.

Segments define the list of individuals who match the specified conditions at the time the segment is created. If you build the segment again at a later date, using the same insight or conditions, the list of individuals included in the segment is likely to be different.

The list of conditions and insights available for use in building segments depends on the variety, depth, and currency of the customer data that you import.