Excluding Segments from Campaigns

Remove specific audiences from campaign sends

Excluding Segments from Campaigns

Segment exclusions let you remove specific groups of contacts from a campaign send, even if those contacts are members of your target audience. This gives you fine-grained control over who receives your emails.

Why Exclude Segments?

• Avoid over-mailing — exclude contacts who received a campaign recently.
• Suppress specific groups — exclude VIP customers from a discount offer meant for new subscribers.
• A/B holdout groups — exclude a control group to measure campaign impact.
• Compliance — exclude contacts who have not given consent for a particular message type.

How to Exclude Segments

1. Open your campaign in the Campaign Builder.
2. Navigate to the audience selection step.
3. Below the target segment selector, you will see an Exclude segments section.
4. Click Add exclusion and select one or more segments from the dropdown.
5. Segments that are already selected as target audiences are disabled in the exclusion dropdown to prevent conflicts.
6. The estimated recipient count updates to reflect the exclusions.
7. Continue building your campaign as normal.

How Exclusions Work Internally

When you send or schedule a campaign with exclusion segments, Mailnaptic first builds the full recipient list from your target lists and segments. It then removes any contact that belongs to one or more of your exclusion segments. This removal happens at queue time, so the exclusion is based on segment membership at the moment the campaign begins sending.

Important Notes

• Exclusion segments must already exist before you can select them. Create your exclusion segment under Audiences → Segments first.
• A contact only needs to match the exclusion segment at the time of sending. Since segments are dynamic, a contact could enter or leave an exclusion segment between when you schedule and when the campaign actually sends.
• Exclusions are applied after all target segments are merged, so a contact present in multiple target segments is still excluded if they appear in any exclusion segment.
• You can view which exclusion segments were applied to a sent campaign on the campaign detail page under the audience section.

Tips

• Create reusable exclusion segments like “Emailed in last 48 hours” or “Suppressed contacts” that you can apply across multiple campaigns.
• Always check the updated recipient count after adding exclusions to make sure your audience size is still appropriate.
• The exclusion segment feature requires a database migration. If the feature is not visible, ensure the campaign_exclusion_segment table has been created.