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What is Segment?

Segment is an integration tool which:

1. Let’s you collect customer data from various customer touch points (web, server, cloud apps or mobile)

2. Once the data is collected, Segment sends it to Freshmarketer (or any analytical tool they are integrated with), helping you capture all your prospects and important activities performed by the customer in Freshmarketer. 

Your marketing folks can now collect contacts, reach out to them through marketing campaigns or onboard contacts to marketing journeys.

Freshmarketer’s integration with Segment let’s you:

- Create or update contacts.

- Capture the page views (coming soon)

- Track events that you’ve asked for (coming soon)

When and why is it needed?

When you’re a small company, customising your data(writing a suitable code) to integrate your website/app to a tool would not be difficult. Mainly because you might only integrate with a couple or more tools.

But as your company grows, so does the list of integration tools you deal with. Then, it becomes quite a pain to customise data to suit each tool separately.

That’s when Segment comes in handy.

All you need to do is:

1. Prepare the data you send to Segment, according to their specified format. (one time preparation)

2. Segment processes the data from your website or app.

3. Finally, pushes the processed data into the tools you’ve chosen as destination.

What are the different sources from which contacts are captured through Segment into Freshmarketer?

You can either push data from,

- Client’s side

- Server’s side

To know more, refer this article.

For example, you can treat the web and mobile platform for the same organisation as two different sources and push data into the segment. Data from both the sources are pushed to all chosen destinations from Segment.

What are the different methods used in this integration?

• Identify

• Page(coming soon)

• Track(coming soon)

Refer this article to know more.

How to enable Segment for Freshmarketer?

If you use Segment to push data from your web app and website into multiple analytical tools, you can integrate your Freshmarketer account with Segment too. The integration is quick and easy.

Here’s how you do it,

1. Login to Freshmarketer as an Administrator.

2. Go to Admin Settings > Integrations > Third Party Integrations.

3. Enable Segment toggle button. Freshmarketer automatically sends a request to Segment with your API key.

4. You’d be directed to Segment’s homepage. Click 'Login' and sign into your Segment account.

5. Once you sign in, you are directed to Send data to Freshmarketer window. 

6. Click 'Send Data' when you’re done.

7. You are redirected to the Third party integrations page in Freshmarketer where you can find Segment enabled.

 8. Now the contacts gets created or updated in Freshmarketer which is pushed via segment.

Common error: Why is Freshmarketer not accepting the data sent by Segment?

Reason: The Segment integration toggle in Freshmarketer is not enabled. If you’re already a segment user, you might have directly logged into your segment account and enabled Freshmarketer from Segment’s integrations page.

Solution: Log in through Freshmarketer and enable Segment. Do not directly sign into Segment.

How are contacts created/updated in Freshmarketer through the integration?

This is how your website/app’s data is processed before sending it to Freshmarketer. Let's say, you want to capture all your website sign ups as a contact. 

1. Identifying the contacts: User ID & Traits

User ID: Your contact provides his/her email(email being a unique field) as the User ID . Or, a primary key (DB ID) from the database is associated with the contact for identification.

Traits: All other details like contact’s name, company name, phone number, address, etc. provided by him/her before clicking the Sign-up button are the traits of the contact.

After assimilating this information,

2. List of Freshmarketer’s contacts is searched to match the User ID inside Freshmarketer.

3. Once a match is found, the respective contact is updated with the traits. Otherwise, a new contact is created.