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Organizing Your Audience with Segments

Use the Segments view to see your contacts grouped automatically by subscription status and email domain, so you understand the shape of your audience before you send.

What segments are

Segments give you an automatic breakdown of your audience without any manual tagging. StretchMail groups your contacts by two dimensions that matter most for sending:

  • Status — how many are subscribed versus unsubscribed.
  • Email domain — the domain each contact's address belongs to (e.g. gmail.com, outlook.com, acme.co), so you can see where your audience actually lives.

You'll find them under Audience → Segments. Segments are a read-and-understand tool: they tell you the composition of a list before you send to it.

Why the domain breakdown matters

Seeing your audience by email domain is more useful than it first looks:

  • A large share of one provider (say 60% gmail.com) tells you which inbox to test against — send yourself a test to a Gmail address and you're checking where most of your list will see it.
  • A cluster of one company's domain (e.g. many @acme.co addresses) often signals a B2B relationship worth its own list.
  • A spike in unusual or role-based domains can flag list-quality problems before they hurt deliverability.

Step 1 — Open Segments

  1. Go to StretchMail → Audience → Segments.
  2. Review the grouped breakdown. Each row shows a status, a domain, and the count of contacts matching both, along with which list they belong to.

Step 2 — Filter to a single list

If you manage several lists, narrow the view to one list to see that audience's composition on its own. This is the quickest way to sanity-check a list right before a campaign.

Step 3 — Act on what you see

Segments inform decisions elsewhere in StretchMail:

  • Test your campaign against the most common domain in the segment.
  • Prune or re-engage lists with a high unsubscribed share.
  • Split out a company domain into its own list for tailored messaging.

Worked example

Acme Co. opens Segments for its Newsletter subscribers list and sees:

  • subscribed / gmail.com — 210
  • subscribed / outlook.com — 96
  • subscribed / acme-partners.com — 41
  • unsubscribed / gmail.com — 18

Two takeaways: most subscribers are on Gmail (so the team sends a test to a Gmail inbox before every campaign), and there's a meaningful cluster of acme-partners.com contacts — a partner audience the team decides to split into its own list for a dedicated partner update.

Tips

  • Check Segments before every big send. A 30-second look at the status/domain mix catches list-health issues early.
  • Test against your top domain. Deliverability quirks differ by provider; test where most of your audience actually is.
  • Watch your unsubscribed share. A growing unsubscribed slice is a signal to revisit frequency or content.

FAQ

Do I create segments manually?
No. Segments are computed automatically from your contacts' status and email domain — there's nothing to configure.

Can I send a campaign to just one segment?
Campaigns send to a list. Use segments to understand a list's makeup; if you need to mail a specific subset, create a dedicated list for it.

Why do I see the same domain twice?
Once per status. subscribed / gmail.com and unsubscribed / gmail.com are counted separately.

Troubleshooting

  • Segments look empty. The list has no contacts yet, or you've filtered to a list with none. Add contacts under Audience first.
  • Counts don't match my list total. The list count reflects only subscribed contacts, while Segments show every status — the numbers reconcile once you add the unsubscribed rows.

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