Membership segments
A membership segment lets you define which of your customers to target in a marketing campaign. The segment reflects whatever audience the members represent. For example, the segment might consist of top spenders, lapsed customers, loyalty members who haven't converted to online ordering or new subscribers in a particular region.
When creating the segment, you define its name and description and Instacart generates its ID. All these values are stable and persistent. This lets you add and remove members without losing the segment’s identity.
A segment’s external IDs, which represent individual members, derive from your own systems. These IDs might consist of loyalty card numbers or hashed email addresses that map to the customers in that group. You work with your Instacart representative to configure the ID’s format. The main requirement is that the IDs consistently resolve to customers within Instacart's systems.
Your integration is responsible for deciding when a segment’s membership changes and for pushing those changes to Instacart in add and remove requests. This lets you programmatically synchronize segment members based on your CRM data. For example, you could perform a nightly synchronization job or trigger a push after a CRM state change.
Clearing a segment's membership is an asynchronous operation because segments often contain large numbers of external IDs. To help you manage the clearing process, Instacart provides a status endpoint. You can poll this endpoint to determine whether the clear is complete before adding new members.