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Tags vs. Groups vs. Segments

André Schlarbaum
Updated

Three tools, three different jobs

Mailchimp gives you three ways to organize contacts inside an audience. They can look similar at first glance, but they're built for different purposes:

Groups

Subscriber-facing categories, organized under a Group Category (e.g. Category: "Communication Preferences" → Groups: "Offers", "Newsletter", "Events"). Guests typically choose these themselves - on a signup form or preference page - so Groups reflect what a guest says they're interested in.

Tags

Internal labels, invisible to the guest. Tags are added based on what you know about a contact - manually, through an import, an integration, or an automation - rather than something the guest selects. A contact can carry any number of tags, and tags carry no built-in structure or hierarchy.

Segments

A saved filter, built from any combination of contact data: merge fields (like country or booking source), Groups, Tags, or Mailchimp-tracked engagement (opens, clicks). Segments are how you combine everything else into a specific, reusable audience for a campaign.

 

How the CDP fits in

The CDP works with Tags only

  • When the CDP syncs a guest audience (for example, a segment built in the CDP) to Mailchimp, it does so by adding a matching tag to each corresponding contact in the connected Mailchimp audience.
  • The CDP does not create or manage Mailchimp Groups, and it does not build native Mailchimp Segments - those remain tools you configure directly inside Mailchimp.
  • Once a CDP-driven tag lands on a contact, it behaves like any other Mailchimp tag: you can send directly to it, use it as one of the conditions inside a Segment, or use it to trigger an automation.

In practice, this means the CDP's job ends at applying the tag - everything downstream (building a broader segment around that tag, or wiring up an automation) is configured in Mailchimp. For example, to reach "CDP tag = OTA Winback AND Country = UK", you'd build that combination as a Mailchimp Segment referencing the CDP's tag as one condition.

 

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