Tags and segments are both ways to group your contacts, but they work differently and are suited to different situations.
Tags are labels you manually assign to contacts. They do not change unless you add or remove them. A contact keeps a tag until you explicitly take it away. This makes tags useful for things that are fixed or intentional, like marking someone as a paying customer, a partner, or someone who signed up through a specific campaign. You are in full control of who has a tag.
Segments are dynamic. Instead of manually assigning contacts, you define a set of conditions and the segment automatically includes everyone who matches them at any given time. If a contact’s data changes and they no longer match, they are removed. If a new contact meets the criteria, they are added. This makes segments useful for things that change over time, like contacts who have opened an email in the last 30 days, subscribers from a specific country, or anyone with a high click rate.
A simple way to think about it: use tags when you want to label contacts based on something that happened, and use segments when you want to target contacts based on who they are or how they behave right now.
In practice, you can use both together. For example, you could tag contacts who purchased a product, and then create a segment of those tagged contacts who have also been active in the last 60 days.
Tips
- Tags are great for campaign targeting when you have a fixed, curated group in mind.
- Segments are better when your targeting criteria changes frequently or depends on engagement data like open and click rates.