If you’re in B2B marketing or sales and keep hearing about “personalization,” you know it’s mostly thrown around without much substance. This guide is for folks who want to actually do it—specifically with Segment, a customer data platform that (when set up right) can help you build and manage real audiences for outreach that isn’t just spray-and-pray.
Let’s cut through the fluff and walk through the practical steps to create, manage, and use audiences in Segment for B2B outreach that doesn’t make prospects roll their eyes.
Step 1: Get Your Data House in Order
Before you even touch the audiences feature, you need good data. If your Segment events are a mess, your audiences will be, too. Here’s what you actually need:
- Consistent tracking: Make sure you’re sending the same events and traits for every user and account. If “Company Size” is sometimes a string, sometimes a number, expect headaches.
- Account-level data: B2B means you care about companies, not just users. Use Segment’s “groups” calls to tie users to companies.
- Enrich where it matters: Tools like Clearbit can fill in missing firmographics, but don’t go overboard. Only enrich what you’ll actually use.
Pro tip: Don’t try to track every possible event. Focus on signals that map to buying intent or key lifecycle stages.
Step 2: Define What Personalization Means for You
Don’t start building audiences just because the feature exists. Figure out what “personalized outreach” actually looks like in your company. A few questions to clarify:
- Are you segmenting by industry, company size, user activity, or something else?
- Is your sales team reaching out 1:1, or are you running automated email campaigns?
- What data do you really have today, and what’s just wishful thinking?
Write down the use cases you care about—e.g., “Send a tailored email to finance companies with >500 employees that started a trial in the last 7 days.”
Ignore: Fancy demographic data that you’ll never actually use to change your messaging.
Step 3: Build Your First Audience in Segment
Now for the fun part. In Segment, “Audiences” are dynamic groups based on real-time data. Here’s how to build one that’s actually useful:
3.1. Head to Audiences
- Go to the “Audiences” section in Segment (sometimes called “Personas” in older docs).
- Click “New Audience.”
3.2. Set Up Your Rules
- Pick whether you’re building a user-level or account-level audience. For B2B, account-level is usually more useful.
- Set your criteria. For example:
- “Company Industry is SaaS”
- “User signed up in the last 14 days”
- “Company Size is greater than 100 employees”
- Combine filters as needed. Don’t get too clever—start simple.
3.3. Preview and Test
- Use the preview to see who matches. Sanity check: Are these the people/companies you expect?
- If it’s empty or full of junk, go back and tweak your criteria.
What works: Simple, clear rules that map to real outreach actions.
What doesn’t: Overlapping, complicated filters you can’t explain to the sales team.
Step 4: Connect Your Audiences to Destinations
No point building audiences if you just leave them sitting in Segment. The real value comes when you sync them to tools your team actually uses—email platforms, CRMs, ad networks, etc.
- Choose your destination(s): Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Customer.io—whatever you use.
- Decide on sync frequency. Real-time is nice, but daily is usually fine for B2B.
- Map audience fields to your destination fields. This step is where things often break—double-check the mapping.
Pro tip: Start with one or two destinations. Add more only when you’ve proven the audience is useful.
Step 5: Use Audiences for Actual Outreach
With audiences synced, here’s how to use them for real personalized outreach:
- Sales: Create call or email tasks for reps against target accounts. Send them context—why these accounts, what’s the hook.
- Marketing: Trigger nurture emails or campaigns that actually reference the audience criteria (“Saw you just started a trial with 200 employees in fintech…”).
- Ads: Run LinkedIn or Facebook campaigns targeting these segments—just be careful with budgets; B2B lists can get small and expensive fast.
What works: Outreach that’s specific to the audience. Generic, “Hi {{FirstName}}, I see you work at {{Company}}” emails are dead on arrival.
What to ignore: Any campaign you wouldn’t want to receive yourself.
Step 6: Maintain, Clean, and Iterate
Audiences aren’t set-and-forget. Here’s how to keep them useful:
- Regularly review who’s in/out: If your “Enterprise SaaS” audience suddenly includes a bunch of tiny agencies, something’s off.
- Retire unused audiences: Don’t let clutter pile up. If a segment isn’t driving action, kill it.
- Add new signals over time: As you get more data (like product usage), build richer audiences—but only if you’ll actually use them.
Warning: The more audiences you have, the easier it is to lose the plot. Stick to what’s actionable.
Common Pitfalls and How to Dodge Them
- Too much complexity: If you have to draw a diagram to explain an audience, simplify.
- Bad data in, bad audience out: Garbage data kills personalization. Fix upstream.
- Sync errors: Test audience syncs before letting the sales or marketing team rely on them.
- Over-personalizing: Just because you can segment by coffee preference doesn’t mean you should.
Wrapping Up: Keep It Simple, Iterate, and Stay Sane
You don’t need a 20-step audience flow or a PhD in data science to get value from Segment for B2B outreach. Start with what you have, keep the audience rules simple, and only personalize when it’ll actually make a difference. If your team can’t explain why someone’s in an audience, that’s a red flag.
Personalized outreach is worth it—but only if it’s grounded in real data and focused on actions you’ll take. Build, test, and refine. Don’t chase every shiny object. Segment is just a tool; the real impact comes from how you use it.