marketing segment that includes only very old contacts

[JayG07370]

I'm trying to create a marketing segment that is tailored specifically to people who have not opened any emails from me since 2019. I find that I periodically get orders from customers who have not been in my store in many years, but I'm sure there are many more potential old customers who I could revive with a targeted email. It appears that segments cannot be created for people prior to 2019, while my list dates back many years prior to that. How do I do that?

[William_A]

Hello @JayG07370 ,

There's a ~5 year cap for custom date-ranges for segmentations since there's a lot of issues (predominantly recalculation lag) that start arising as the range grows in size. 

As a workaround, I'd advise setting up at least a couple segmentations for the date ranges you're interested in pulling from (e.g. Jan 1, 2018 - Dec 31, 2021, then the other Jan 1, 2022 - May 6, 2024). Otherwise, it's also very likely that if a contact has not opened any of your emails since May 2019, the same contacts would match if the criteria were able to be set for 2018. The third option would be to just use our pre-built low engagement segmentation. 

[JayG07370]

Can I create a segment that includes all people who have signed up SINCE 2019, then create an email to send to anyone EXCLUDED from that segment? That would accomplish what I want to do, but I don't see how to do that.

[William_A]

There isn't an exclusion function for sending emails to segments. It'd be a matter of making new lists from the segment and your current list(s), and then removing all the contacts in the segmented list from those newer main lists.