What’s the difference between targeting and segmentation?
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Segmentation is how you group your audience. Targeting is what you decide to do with each group.
Segmentation is the upstream work: dividing subscribers by behavior, demographics, purchase history, lifecycle stage, or whatever criteria matter for your program. The output is a set of distinct groups. "customers who purchased in the last 30 days," "subscribers who've never clicked," "trial users who haven't converted."
Targeting is the downstream decision: which of those segments receives a specific message, at what time, with what content. You might have a "recent buyers" segment. Whether you target them with a cross-sell campaign, an onboarding sequence, or a satisfaction survey is a targeting decision.
In practice, most senders mix these up because ESPs handle both in the same workflow. But the distinction matters when campaigns underperform. If results were off, was the problem who you sent to (segmentation) or what you sent them (targeting)? Those are different problems with different fixes.
A useful diagnostic: if your open rates are low, that's often a targeting problem, the subject or content didn't resonate with that audience. If your click rates are low despite good opens, that could be either. If you're getting complaints, that's almost always a segmentation problem, the wrong people received the message.
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