Audiences, groups, tags, and segments
Readers are sorted with four tools, plus the values you keep on each person. From the outside in:
An audience is one publication—one pen name, one newsletter. It owns its readers, forms, campaigns, sending domain, and (importantly) its own suppression list. If you write under two names, that's two audiences: a reader unsubscribing from one hasn't unsubscribed from the other.
Groups are lists you place readers into explicitly—"ARC team", "Street team", "Imported from MailerLite". A reader can be in many groups.
Tags are labels that accumulate on a reader—"BookFunnel", "giveaway-2026", "clicked-preorder". Tags are also what automations react to: a sequence can fire the moment a tag is added.
Segments are saved searches—rules like "active, tagged BookFunnel, joined in the last 90 days" that are re-evaluated live every time they're used. A segment updates itself; a group only changes when someone changes it.
Fields are values you collect beyond name and email—a birthday, an anniversary, a city, a yes or no. They are not in the sidebar. Open Subscribers and press Fields.
Which do I use?
- Membership someone chose or you assigned → group
- A label you might start an automation from, or filter on → tag
- A value the reader gave you, such as a birthday or a city → field
- "Everyone who currently matches these rules" for sending → segment
Fields
- Open the audience's Subscribers page and press Fields.
- Give the field a label and a type: Text, Number, Date, or Yes / no. The saved key is made from the label. That key is also a merge tag—
{{baby_name|your baby}}—in campaigns and automation emails. See Merge tags. - Turn it on for a form under Forms & pages, or fill it in on a reader's page. A CSV import can map a column onto it too. Imported fields arrive as Text.
To change a type, use the Type menu on that field's row. Values that can be read are converted. Anything that can't is left exactly as it was, and the row tells you how many of each. That's how an imported birthday becomes a Date an automation can use. Deleting a field's definition leaves the values already stored on readers.
A Date field can start an automation on that day, or hold a reader until it. See welcome sequences.
Finding who is not in a group
Both filters on the Contacts page run backwards as well as forwards. The group menu offers Not in any group (readers no group has ever claimed) and a Is NOT in list for excluding one particular group; the tag menu offers Not tagged at all and Does not have tag.
The everyday use: you make a new group—say "Weekly newsletter"—and want everyone who isn't sorted yet in it. Filter to Not in any group, tick the checkbox at the top of the list, choose Select all N matching, then pick the group under Add to group. Contacts who unsubscribed or bounced aren't in that view to begin with (see below), so they can't be swept in.
Bulk adds are quiet on purpose: filing thousands of existing readers into a group never starts a sequence, however that group is used. Enrolling a segment on the sequence—or choosing an automation on Subscribers → Import—is the deliberate way to start one.
Segment rules speak the same language—is in no group at all, has no tags at all, plus "is not in" and "does not have" for a named one—so anything you can filter to, you can save and send to.
Combining rules with AND and OR
Between every pair of rules in the segment builder sits an AND or an OR. Click it to change it.
- AND means a reader must match both sides. Use it to narrow: is in "ARC team" AND does not have tag "already-reviewed".
- OR means matching either side is enough. Use it to widen: is in "Street team" OR is in "ARC team".
Rules joined by OR sit together inside an outline so you can see they travel as one alternative. A rule set is the same idea you can build on purpose: click + Add a rule set, put rules inside it, and pick whether readers need to match ANY of them or ALL of them. Then connect the set to whatever comes next with AND or OR, like any other rule.
The everyday recipe—"everyone in any of these groups, except two tags"—reads exactly as you'd say it: a rule set holding is in group… rules (matching ANY), then AND does not have tag…, AND does not have tag….
One thing the builder will warn you about: an exclusion joined by OR doesn't exclude. "Does not have tag X" with an OR in front of it adds every reader without that tag, because OR can only ever widen. The builder flags it under the rule the moment it happens and tells you the one-click fix—switch that connector to AND. Preview count is always worth a click before saving: if the number looks like your whole list, a connector is probably an OR that should be an AND.
Your list, and everyone else
The Contacts page opens on Your list: the contacts you can send to today. Everyone else sits in one quiet Inactive tab beside it—people who unsubscribed, addresses that bounced, anyone who complained, and signups who never clicked the confirmation link. The test is simply whether the next campaign could reach them.
Open Inactive and it breaks down by reason—unconfirmed, unsubscribed, bounced, cleaned, complained—plus everyone for one undivided list.
Unconfirmed is the one you can do something about: they signed up but never clicked the confirmation link, so nothing can reach them. Filter to unconfirmed, tick the people you want, and choose Resend confirmation—or open one contact for the same button. Each contact gets that resend once. If they don't click it the second time either, that is an answer, and chasing it further is how a sender earns spam complaints.
That split matters most right after a migration. It's normal for an imported list to carry more inactive contacts than live ones, and a headline count that's mostly people who left tells you nothing true about the size of your audience. Nothing is hidden—only unmixed.
If you search for a reader on Your list and they aren't there, the page tells you how many match among the inactive and offers to search everyone instead—so looking someone up never dead-ends just because they left.
Because the default view is your live list, bulk actions and the Export CSV button follow it: select-all-matching can't reach into the unsubscribed by accident.