How to Segment Audiences with Contact Properties in Sendrealm

Useful segmentation starts with a business question, not a long list of filters. Who needs this message now, who should not receive it, and which contact data proves the difference?

Sendrealm supports two audience models. A static audience is a maintained list of contacts. A dynamic audience is a saved set of rules that Sendrealm evaluates against contact fields and custom properties. Choosing the right model makes campaigns easier to review and keeps targeting from drifting over time.

Choose static or dynamic before adding contacts

Use a static audience when membership is an explicit fact that your team controls, such as:

• people registered for a particular webinar;
• customers included in a migration wave;
• recipients imported from a consented partner list;
• an internal seed list used for campaign review.

Static audiences are also the destination for manual and CSV contact imports.

Use a dynamic audience when membership should change as contact data changes, such as:

• trial accounts whose lifecycle stage is trial;
• customers whose plan is pro and region is BR;
• contacts created after a launch date;
• users whose custom onboarding_complete property is false.

A contact can qualify for a dynamic audience today and stop qualifying tomorrow without anyone manually moving it.

Design contact properties before you design rules

Sendrealm can evaluate standard contact fields—including email, first name, last name, full name, and creation date—and custom properties supplied by your application or contact workflow.

Good custom properties describe durable facts:

Prefer a small controlled vocabulary over free-form text. pro, Pro, and professional may describe the same plan to a person but behave like three different values in a rule. Document the expected type and allowed values, and have one source system own each property.

Avoid putting secrets or unnecessary sensitive data into contact properties. Store only what the messaging use case needs.

Build a dynamic audience step by step

1. Open Audiences and create a dynamic audience.
2. Give it a name that explains the population, such as Trial — onboarding incomplete, instead of a campaign-specific name such as March email.
3. Add rules using standard fields or custom properties.
4. Choose AND when every condition must match. Choose OR when any condition is enough.
5. Preview the result and inspect the matched and reachable counts.
6. Save the audience, then use it from the campaign targeting workflow.

For example, an onboarding reminder might be expressed as:

lifecycle_stage equals "trial"
AND onboarding_complete equals false
AND region equals "US"

Do not add conditions merely because the data exists. Every rule should have a clear reason, otherwise the audience becomes difficult to audit.

Separate eligibility from consent

A property can show that a contact is relevant, but relevance is not permission. Subscription state, suppression state, and channel reachability still determine whether Sendrealm should attempt delivery.

That distinction matters during imports. A CSV value is not a safe way to override an unsubscribe, and re-adding a contact to a static audience should not be used to work around a complaint or hard-bounce suppression. Treat consent and suppression as operational controls, not targeting attributes.

Preview every campaign audience

Before scheduling a campaign, compare the preview with an expected range. If a segment normally contains 8,000 contacts and suddenly contains 80,000, pause the launch and investigate.

Check at least these questions:

• Does the count roughly match the source system?
• Are the field types and values consistent?
• Did an OR replace an intended AND?
• Are newly created contacts expected to enter this audience?
• Does the reachable count reflect unsubscribed or unavailable recipients?
• Should an internal seed audience receive the message too?

For high-risk sends, sample contacts near each rule boundary. A count can look plausible while still containing the wrong people.

Name audiences for reuse and ownership

A practical naming pattern is:

[Lifecycle or function] — [qualifying state] — [region or channel]

Examples:

• Onboarding — incomplete setup — email
• Billing — renewal in 14 days — US
• Product — Android beta — push

Record the business owner, source properties, and intended use in your internal documentation. Review frequently used audiences on a schedule and archive definitions that no longer match the product.

Common segmentation mistakes

Importing into a dynamic audience

Imports are for static audiences. If membership must be rule-driven, import or update the contacts first and let their fields determine whether they match.

Encoding business logic in audience names

The name is for people; the saved conditions are the executable definition. Do not rely on a label such as “active users” if the actual rules no longer represent activity.

Using missing values as meaningful values

Missing, false, zero, and an empty string are not always equivalent. Normalize data at ingestion and test how the intended operator treats each state.

Creating a new audience for every send

Campaign-specific lists accumulate quickly and make reporting harder to interpret. Reuse stable lifecycle definitions and create one-off static audiences only when the membership is genuinely one-off.

A launch checklist

Before using a saved audience in production:

• define the business question it answers;
• document the property owner and accepted values;
• verify AND and OR grouping;
• preview matched and reachable counts;
• sample contacts that should match and should not match;
• confirm subscription and suppression controls remain intact;
• record who owns future review.

Segmentation works when the definition is explainable, the underlying data is dependable, and the final population is verified. Sendrealm provides the static lists, dynamic rules, custom properties, and previews; the durable advantage comes from operating those tools with a clear data contract.