What’s the right refresh frequency for segments?
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You set up your "engaged subscribers" segment three months ago using "clicked in the last 90 days" as the criteria. The problem: it hasn't been refreshing on schedule. You're now sending to people who clicked once in early February and have gone completely quiet since. Your segment definition is right; your refresh cadence is the problem.
Behavioral segments, meaning segments built on recent actions like clicks, purchases, and site visits, should refresh as often as possible. Daily is good; real-time is better. The whole point of "clicked in the last 30 days" is that it reflects current engagement, not where someone stood last week. If your ESP rebuilds criteria-based dynamic segments once a day, that's workable for most senders. If it's only refreshing weekly, your engagement data is likely stale by the time you send.
Lifecycle segments (onboarding sequences, win-back flows, post-purchase tracks) can refresh less frequently because the trigger events are slower-moving. Weekly works well here. Someone who purchased yesterday will enter the post-purchase segment within a week, which is usually fine for a nurture sequence that runs over 30 days. The risk with infrequent refreshes on lifecycle segments isn't staleness, it's delay: someone who just became eligible for a win-back sequence shouldn't wait two weeks to enter it.
Demographic and preference segments, things like "subscribers in the northeast" or "people who indicated interest in product category X," can refresh monthly. This data changes slowly. Where monthly becomes a problem is when you're running dynamic content that depends on preference data being accurate at send time. In that case, bump preference segment refreshes to at least weekly.
The easiest starting point: check how your ESP handles refresh for your three most active flows. Look at the segment settings and find out whether it's real-time, daily, weekly, or manual. If it's manual, that's your first fix. For segments driving high-volume automations, daily is a reasonable floor, and most modern ESPs like Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign support this by default. Once you've confirmed refresh cadence is set correctly, a segment health audit is a solid follow-up to catch any other gaps.
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