Tags and Segments help you organize your subscribers.
Some email platforms let users split their subscribers into multiple email lists. In Kit, however, your subscribers are all in one list, and you use Tags and Segments to organize them.
You’ll find your lists of Tags and Segments in the right sidebar of the Subscribers page:
Next to each Tag or Segment is the current number of subscribers who have that Tag or are in that Segment (as relevant).
NOTE: Subscriber counts are not updated instantly. When the number of subscribers who have a certain Tag or who are in a certain Segment changes, it may take a few minutes for that Tag or Segment to reflect its latest subscriber count on the Subscribers page.
After tagging and segmenting your subscribers, you’ll be able to take certain actions with them.
In this article, we’ll share:
What are Tags?
Tags are labels you can add to subscribers to create fixed groups of subscribers based on a certain shared characteristic.
For example, you can create:
A Tag called “Beginner photographers” to tag all subscribers who have indicated they are beginner photographers
A Tag called “Webinar attendees” to tag all subscribers who have attended your webinar
A Tag called “Course pitch: In progress” to tag all subscribers currently going through your course pitch email sequence
Here, we have four Tags to organize subscribers according to their levels of paddle-boarding experience:
Tags will remain on a subscriber unless they have intentionally been removed (whether manually or through an automated process).
Subscribers can have multiple Tags. There is no limit on the number of Tags a subscriber can be tagged with.
For example, if a subscriber is a beginner photographer who attended your webinar, they can be tagged with both the “Beginner photographers” Tag and the “Webinar attendees” Tag.
How do subscribers get tagged?
Manual tagging
You can manually add Tags to your subscribers from the Subscribers page. We cover the process of manually tagging subscribers here.
Manually tagging your subscribers can be helpful in these situations:
Manually adjusting your subscribers' Tags. Let's say you send Broadcasts to subscribers tagged with “Pet Lovers.” If a subscriber requests to receive these Broadcasts, you can manually tag them with “Pet Lovers” so they receive them.
Triggering a Visual Automation or automation rule. You can set up your Visual Automation or automation rule to start running when subscribers are added to a certain Tag.
Tagging subscribers you import into Kit. When importing subscribers, you can tag them with Tags like “Migrated from ACME Email Platform” or "Imported February 3rd, 2025 at 3:54 PM" to provide context on how they joined your list.
Automatic tagging
Subscribers can also be tagged automatically. Learn how to automatically tag your subscribers here.
You may want to automatically tag subscribers in situations like these:
Letting subscribers manage their subscription preferences. You can automatically tag subscribers based on the interests they’ve provided in your email opt-in, or when they update their subscriber profile.
When subscribers have met certain conditions. For example, you can tag subscribers who buy your course as “Course buyer” to exclude them from emails that pitch your course. To set up this automatic tagging, set up a Visual Automation that automatically adds the “Course buyer” Tag to subscribers who buy your course.
When you want to tag subscribers who click certain links in your emails. You can set up a Link Trigger that automatically adds a certain Tag to subscribers who click these links.
What can you do with tagged subscribers?
After tagging your subscribers, you can do things like:
Send Broadcast or Sequence emails to only these subscribers (or, alternatively, excluding them) with email filters.
Send subscribers through a Visual Automation or automation rule. If you have set a Tag as an entry point for a Visual Automation or automation rule, those automations will trigger when you add subscribers to that Tag.
Customize your subscribers’ journey in a Visual Automation. You can use Tags to set up conditional paths in Visual Automations, where subscribers will go through branches of your Visual Automation only if they have (or don’t have) a certain Tag.
Filtering your Subscribers page graphs data. This is handy for comparing email campaign performance among groups of subscribers with different Tags.
What are Segments?
Segments are fluid groups of subscribers who meet certain filter conditions. These conditions include:
Condition | Example of condition |
Subscribers who have been tagged with certain Tags | All subscribers who have either the “Piano Students” or “Guitar Students” Tags |
Subscribers who have signed up via certain email opt-ins | All subscribers who signed up via the “Apple Pie Recipe,” “Strawberry Cheesecake Recipe,” or “Banana Bread Recipe” Forms |
Subscribers who live in a certain geographical region | All subscribers within 10 miles of Boise, Idaho |
Subscribers with certain sign-up dates | All subscribers who signed up after December 31, 2023, but before January 1, 2025 |
Among other uses, Segments can help group subscribers with different Tags or who signed up through different email opt-ins.
From the first example condition above, you’ll see that you can use a Segment called “Piano and Guitar Students” to group all subscribers who have either the “Piano Students” or “Guitar Students” Tags.
TECHNICAL NOTE: The logic within any single filter is always OR. So, the filter pictured above will work regardless of whether you choose "all" or "and" in the dropdown.
Then, if you want to send a Broadcast to all your piano and guitar students, set your Broadcast’s recipients as the subscribers in your “Piano and Guitar Students” Segment.
While you could create a Tag called “Piano and Guitar Students” to group all your piano and guitar students together, doing this might be tedious.
Your students would also have two separate Tags, such as “Piano Students” and “Piano and Guitar Students,” which can add unnecessary Tag clutter.
How are Segments of subscribers created and updated?
Once you’ve set up your Segments, we’ll automatically add (or remove) subscribers from them when subscribers meet (or no longer meet) the Segment’s filter conditions.
Depending on your subscribers’ interactions with you, the list of subscribers in a Segment could change many times a day.
For example, you may have a Segment for all subscribers who have bought your product. On January 1, 2025, at 10 a.m., you had 100 subscribers in this Segment. But on the same day at 10.05 a.m., a subscriber newly buys your product.
We’ll then automatically update your Segment to contain 101 subscribers.
What can you do with subscribers in a Segment?
After adding subscribers to a Segment, you can do things like:
Sending Broadcast or Sequence emails to only these subscribers (or, alternatively, excluding them) with email filters.
Filtering your Subscribers page graphs data. This is handy for comparing email campaign performance among different Segments of subscribers.
Summary: When to use a Tag or Segment
When organizing subscribers
Situation | Tag | Segment |
Create a fixed group of subscribers based on a certain shared characteristic | ✔️ (Tags will remain on subscribers unless intentionally removed) | ❌ (Subscribers in Segments are automatically updated based on your Segment’s filter conditions) |
Create a fluid group of subscribers that automatically updates as and when subscribers meet (or no longer meet) certain filter conditions | ❌ | ✔️ (Depending on your subscribers’ interactions with you, the list of subscribers in a Segment can change as often as a few times a day) |
Grouping subscribers in some way that you can’t easily do with Tags (like grouping subscribers with different Tags, or grouping subscribers by subscribe date) | ❌ | ✔️ |
Actions you can take with tagged/segmented subscribers
Situation | Tag | Segment |
Send a Sequence or Broadcast email to a certain group of subscribers (or exclude this group of subscribers from receiving your email) | ✔️
NOTE: We recommend using a Segment instead of a Tag if you have more complex email recipient conditions (such as sending your email to subscribers tagged with different Tags). | ✔️ |
Let subscribers indicate their interests when subscribing to your email list or when managing their subscriber preferences | ✔️ | ❌ (Our subscriber preferences feature makes use of Tags instead of Segments) |
Trigger a Visual Automation or automation rule
| ✔️ | ❌ (Segments can’t be used to trigger Visual Automations or automation rules) |
Set up conditional paths to customize your subscribers’ journey in a Visual Automation | ✔️ | ❌
NOTE: While you can’t use pre-saved Segments in conditional paths, you can achieve the same effect by recreating your Segments using the Advanced filter conditional path option. |
Filtering your Subscribers page graph data | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Now that you know when to use Tags and Segments, what are the benefits of using them to organize your subscribers? Find out in this blog post 👇