Welcome back. So in this lesson, we're going to go a bit deeper into the segment builder and what it looks like to use pre-saved segments to schedule emails. Because this is one of the most useful features of Bento if you are re-emailing certain segments of your list a bunch of times consistently. Not having to redefine that segment every single time is big time saver, and big mistake saver because a bunch of times when I've sent emails to the wrong people, it's because I forgot to set some specific aspect of a segment.

And having it pre-saved allows us to avoid that. So, let's dive in. So for this lesson, I just want to give you the overview, and in the next lesson is where we'll do the take action, where we'll actually use those test subscribers you made earlier to create specific segments for them. But for now, for the scope of this one, I just wanted to walk you through it.

So, within this segment builder, you will see that everything breaks down into these rules, and you can add groups within them. And so when we talk about groups and filters, a filter is just an item in a group. So if we say email contains Zach, this is one filter within one group of one segment. And so in this case, it looks like in my current account, six users have an email containing Zach, and if I were to change this to not contain Zach, we would see three.

So that seems like I've got nine users. An important consideration when you're building segments is this little line here. So within a group, emails are and style filtering, and across groups they are or. So if you want to send an email to somebody whose email either contains Zach or Jesse, if you were to do this, you would get zero matches unless there was someone named Jesse Zach or [chuckles] Jesse and Zach.

In this case, there are none. Jesse and I don't have a shared email account yet. But if you wanted Jesse or Zach, you would add a group, email contains Jesse. And so now we should get, I think, seven, right?

Because I had six of me, and I think Jesse's in here. Yeah, seven. So you can see this shows or, so what this is saying, someone's email contains Zach or it contains Jesse. One consideration when you're stacking groups like this, let's say it's also important to you that you're only building this segment with people who are subscribed.

There's no way to define the user is subscribed globally as an and, and then have these things as an or. You have to do it twice. You have to do it within each group. So in here you'd go subscription equals subscribed, and then you'd have to remember do it here, too.

So if you were doing something like this where you are doing 10 or conditions, but all of those or conditions need to have an and, the way you do it is like what I just said. And there are also some considerations like antitheses. Let me think of a good example to roll out. I can't really think of a good example.

But I was going to try to show you what we might do if there was something where there was some rule for subscribed versus unsubscribed. I guess I'll try to show you an example. So let's say you want to send it to people whose email contains Jesse that are subscribed, but there's some context where you are down to put someone in a segment who's unsubscribed if some specific thing is true. And they have to be Jesse.

So let's say email contains Jesse, and subscription is unsubscribed, and tags fuzzy, because I don't actually have a tag yet for what I'm about to type. If you do normal tags, you can only choose from a dropdown, whereas if you do tags fuzzy, you can type whatever you want, even if it doesn't exist yet. [lip smack] So let's say their name is Jesse and they're unsubscribed, but they have a tag that's like email even [chuckles] if unsubscribed. So in this case, we're perfectly fine with emailing them because they literally said that for some weird hypothetical reason. So in this case, if Jesse were subscribed, he'd match here.

If he were unsubscribed and had this tag, he would match here. But if he were unsubscribed without this tag, he would not match here. So you wouldn't use this much, but I want to show you that you can stack things that are antithetical to each other, provided there's some specific combination of realities that would have it match. In this case, this would presumably never match because why would this combination of data ever exist [chuckles] in your email marketing platform?

So a more common one would be this. So maybe you want to target, and I think I've shown this in maybe a different video or something. If you had different onboarding statuses, like let's say onboarding step one, onboarding step two, onboarding step three, and you wanted to select those with ors, let me show you what that would look like. And actually, before I do, I want to show you one important thing.

So earlier when we created onboarding status as a field, there's a bug currently at the time of recording that Jesse's already working on fixing, so maybe by the time you see this, it won't be here, where sometimes if you add a custom field on someone's profile, like we did in the previous video, it might not show up immediately in the segment builder. So if this happens to you, like you filled out onboarding status for your test subscriber, but you're not seeing it in the segment builder, what we can do is we can create it not attached to a person, just in general. So, for example, my zach@zachsweinhart one. Oh, so we didn't do onboarding for him yet.

We just did marketing platform, which did show up by now. But nonetheless, let's say we created it here. So let's say onboarding status equals step one. If I add this, unless Jesse already patched this bug, it presumably won't show up in the segment builder.

Let's see. Yeah, so we do not see it here. So if this ever happens to you, what we could do is go to People, and then Fields, and not attached to an individual person, we create that field, and we'll just put the same in both. This is a string.

A string is just text, so keep it as is. Save. And now, if we go to the segment builder, it should be available. Boom.

So, there you go. So, as I was saying, let's say that you wanted to do something like this where somebody has to be a customer of the product. So we go Tags, Contains, the product name. But the or would be they're either in onboarding step one or onboarding step two.

How would you build it? Pause, ask yourself, "How would I build it?" I trust you paused. I trust you unpaused. And if your answer was, you would create two groups, both of which have that flag, and then both of which are stacked with an and for their onboarding status, that matches one of the different steps.

So step one, step two. If you guessed that, you are right. If you guessed that you should do this, you are sadly wrong. And the reason why is that somebody's onboarding status would never contain both step one and step two at the same time.

And remember, within a group, rules are and. So this first set of rules would never, ever match. And additionally, if you did something like this, Tags, Contains, flag, customer, product one. If you did this, this would also be bad.

Because what this would be saying is if somebody has this tag, they will match, and you don't even care what their onboarding status is. And then if somebody has this onboarding status tag, but maybe they refunded the product and they don't have the customer tag, they will match, which is not what you want. Assuming it's not what you want. In this case, it's not what we want, because that was the scope of the assignment.

So, if there's ever something where you need somebody to have two things at once and one of those things is variable, you just want to make sure you stack multiple groups which match as an or, and then stack within those groups all of the ands that always need to happen in order to match. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, because we'll get into more of that in the next lesson. For now, let's keep it a bit simpler. So, let's revert our groups, and let's just call this segment, I'm going to call it Zach or Jesse, just for demo purposes.

And so I'll just do Email, Contains Zach. New group, Email Contains Jesse. And then we should see our seven audience member estimate. Cool.

And then I'll save this segment. And now, within the Emails tab-- Well, actually, first, let's go in the People tab. And so notice how I have nine subscribers total. So this was matching seven of nine, which means it's not matching everybody, which is good, because that's what we want.

It shouldn't match everybody. So now, within the Broadcast tab, when you're creating a broadcast, over here in Recipients, you can choose the segment. So Zach or Jesse. Boom.

And if we click Save Audience, instead of this showing nine people, it shows seven. Amazing. And what's really cool about segments that I learned recently, is when you're creating broadcasts via the API or MCP or any other nifty tooling versus just here in the back end, the segment can actually be passed from there, too. So I set up one of these recently for having AI automatically create weekly emails for me for my live calls for students.

And I was able to remove a one- to two-hour manual task that I do each month that's now just fully automated with AI, and it sets the segment of currently active cohort students, and schedules the emails based on my template and changes out the Zoom URLs and all that stuff. Really, really nifty. So, couple other features for Broadcast while we're here is the concept of scheduling. So right now, it's defaulting to send when ready, but you'll almost always want to schedule an email for later.

So by default, it's going to show times in your current time zone. So I'm in Tallinn, so it's showing them in my time zone. But generally, at least for me and most businesses, we're anchoring to Eastern Time a lot of the time. So if you wanted to send at 10:00 a.m.

Eastern, you can use these really nifty day/night sliders that Jesse made, which I think is just so awesome to see when it's getting set. But notice that now it changed it to not be my time zone. So what you might do is have it set up here in your own time zone so that you can schedule it for what you think makes sense, and then use down here as the demo. So we see 5:00 p.m. my time is 7:00 a.m. in San Francisco, 10:00 a.m. in New York, et cetera.

This is when I usually do it, or maybe 4:00, but we'll do 5:00. And then you click Save Schedule. And now notice that this button says Schedule Send. And so if we were to send it now, we'll see on this finalize-- Well, it won't let me because I didn't make a subject line.

So let me make a subject line. "Sup, bruh?" Save. So now maybe it'll let me. Cool.

And so we see that it's going to send at 5:00 p.m. my time if we were to schedule it, and if you try to click this, it'll make you click it again to confirm, so that you don't accidentally do it. But we're not ready to do that quite yet, because we want to talk about batching. So, [clears throat] basically, batching allows you to spread out your hourly sends to theoretically improve deliverability. I don't personally use this, because especially for a promo email or something that's attached to a very specific time of day, I would much rather have everybody get it at generally the correct time than potentially improve deliverability.

But I imagine Jesse feels quite strongly about spreading them out. So if you want to run your batches in a way that allows you to improve deliverability, that's what this batching setting is for. And so in this case, we have nine recipients. So let's say we do one batch every 60 minutes.

It gives you a preview. Oh, well, we can't do one. But before I click out of the field, we can see down here. So see how it says, "This will send over six hours.

Seven recipients, seven batches needed, one per hour." That kind of thing. But then, in reality, when I click out, the minimum is 10, so it will still send immediately. And so you could just save the settings, and that's how the batching works. That's the overview.

This gives you the basics of how to send, schedule, and segment your emails. And in the next lesson, that's where we'll do an action step to put all this stuff into practice. So I'll see you there.