Segmenting your audience

Buttondown has four ways of segmenting subscribers who might want to receive different content:

• Using one newsletter, but having subscribers tagged into different groups
• Using one newsletter, but searching metadata for a particular property
• Targeting free versus paid subscribers
• Creating a whole separate newsletter, and building a different audience there

flowchart-elk TD
    hosted_archives[Are you using Buttondown's hosted archives?]
    hosted_archives --> |Yes| separate_archives[Should the content for each segment be separate?]
    hosted_archives --> |No| mass_unsubscribe
    separate_archives --> |Yes| multiple_newsletters[Create multiple newsletters]
    separate_archives --> |No| mass_unsubscribe[Should subscribers be able to unsubscribe from all segments at once?]
    mass_unsubscribe --> |No| multiple_newsletters
    mass_unsubscribe --> |Yes| branding[Should each segment have a different branding?]
    branding --> |Yes| multiple_newsletters[Create multiple newsletters]
    branding --> |No| tags[Create one newsletter with tags]

In this guide, we teach you how to use each possible option to get the most out of your newsletter's personalization.

Tags are an easy way to segment users into different groups. You can send emails including or excluding certain tags, making it easy to tailor your newsletter's content to specific subsets of your audience.

To enable tags, go to Settings → Basics, scroll to the Tags section, and toggle the setting on.

There are three different ways to add tags to users:

1. Automatically via your subscription form
2. Manually tagging subscribers in Buttondown
3. Adding them via the API

You may want to create a special form that tags new subscribers based on where they came from or what they signed up for. Then, you can send specific emails to them based on their inbound behavior.

You can automatically tag subscribers by adding a GET parameter of tag to your newsletter's URL. For example, to add the tag sandwich to all subscribers, you'd use the URL:

https://buttondown.com/username?tag=sandwich

Where username corresponds to your Buttondown username. You can find this at Settings → Basics.

To tag new readers who sign up with a specific embedded form, add the following code before your form's submit button:

<input type="hidden" name="tag" value="sandwich" />

[Note: Learn more about tagging new subscribers in our guide to building your subscriber base.]

You can also manually tag users in Buttondown.

To create a new tag, go to Tags and click the "New" button in the top right of the screen.

Next, update your subscribers by selecting their records, then clicking the "Add tags" button in the bottom right corner.

If you're interested in allowing subscribers to manage their tags, send them to Portal, which allows subscribers to manage their tags and subscription preferences.

There's no limit to the number of tags you can have in Buttondown.

Now that you have your readers tagged, you can send a newsletter to only people with a specific tag. When sending your email, you'll see a "Custom…" link to support a tag:

Select "Tag", and then the tag you wish to target with your email.

You can also target specific metadata properties that your subscribers happen to have. For more on how to add metadata, see Building your subscriber base.

When sending your email, you'll see a "Custom…" link to support metadata. Select "Metadata" and the property you wish your subscribers to have.

You can also segment emails so they only send to paid subscribers. To learn how, go to Paid subscriptions.

If you don't want to target a subset of subscribers, but instead build a whole new audience, you may wish to create a second newsletter for the purpose.