Segments define the target audience for your campaigns (men over the age of 30, or people who live in New York, for example). ATG Outreach includes two specialized segment types, opt-in segments and opt-out segments, to help you target your campaigns with even more precision and also to help you comply with anti-spam legislation.

An opt-in segment includes only those customers who (1) elect to receive e-mails (in other words, they have not globally opted out of all e-mail communications) and (2) explicitly subscribe to a particular e-mail category, typically via an “e-mail preferences” form on a company’s Web site. For example:

This sample Web form lists four “opt in” e-mail categories: Sunny Beach Escapes, Cruise Deals, Family Vacations and Last Minute Deals. Each category corresponds to an opt-in segment created by an ATG Outreach administrator or developer. When a customer selects an opt-in category, his user profile is updated accordingly and he automatically becomes a member of the corresponding opt-in segment. (Conversely, if the customer unchecks an e-mail option, he is removed from that opt-in segment.) When you are creating a campaign, you can select any of these opt-in segments to define your target audience. For example, you could create an e-mail campaign specifically for people who opt into both the “Sunny Beach Escapes” and “Last Minute Deals” categories. Bear in mind, however, that all opt-in segments are empty at first; they have no members unless customers choose to opt in.

Opt-out segments work a little differently. These segments include all customers initially; the people who specifically opt out of the corresponding e-mail category are excluded from the segment. In other words, opt-out segments include everyone except the people who have explicitly opted out. For example, the following “opt out” Web form lists four e-mail categories, each of which corresponds to an opt-out segment.

All customers are implicitly subscribed to each opt-out category. If a customer does not want to receive a certain type of communication, she must explicitly opt out of that category.

For example, if you selected the Special Deals opt-out segment as the target audience for a campaign, that campaign would target everyone except the people who opted out of the Special Deals category. Because opt-out segments can be broad in scope, you may want to use them in combination with at least one other regular segment to restrict the initial list of e-mail recipients.