Segment marketing lists with AI
Coco builds marketing segments from natural language. Describe the audience the way you'd describe it to a teammate: "people who downloaded the pricing PDF in the last 30 days, work at companies with 50+ employees, and haven't replied to outbound in 6 months." Coco translates that into the filter logic your CRM understands, previews the membership before anything ships, and keeps the segment synced as records change. About 8-15 credits per segment build, depending on complexity. Approval-gated: you see exactly which records are in and out, why, and approve before the segment writes to your CRM. Once it's live, Coco re-evaluates membership on the cadence you set. No static-list rot.
Try Coco for free → · 1,000 credits free · no card · ~2-min setup
Why segmentation tools fall short
The native segment builders in HubSpot and Salesforce are powerful. They're also expensive in user-time. Building a segment with five filter conditions and a behavioral signal takes roughly 20 clicks across multiple menus. The moment your criteria involve "people who did X AND haven't done Y in the last N days" you're stitching together filters that the UI wasn't designed for.
The deeper problem is the gap between how marketers think about audiences and how the builder makes you describe them. You're thinking: "recent pricing-page visitors who haven't been touched in a while, at companies that look like our best-fit cohort." The tool wants four separate filter rules with specific field comparisons and date math.
Mistakes in segment definitions are quiet. The segment runs anyway, the campaign sends to the wrong audience, and you find out two weeks later when the response data doesn't match. There's no good in-tool way to audit "is this segment actually what I meant?"
Coco closes the gap. The criteria stay in natural language. The translation to filter logic is visible. The membership preview lets you spot misinterpretation before send. The audit trail records both the original description and the resulting filter rules.
How Coco builds a segment
The workflow runs in four steps:
- Parse the natural-language criteria. You describe the segment in plain English. Coco extracts the criteria (fields, operators, time windows, signal sources) and shows you the parse before translation. About 0 credits for the parse pass; reading and reasoning are free.
- Translate to CRM filter logic. Coco generates the equivalent filter rules in your CRM's syntax (HubSpot smart-list logic or Salesforce report criteria) and surfaces both the original phrasing and the translated rules side by side.
- Preview the membership. Coco shows you which records match, sampled across the segment, with the per-record explanation for inclusion. Edge cases get called out: "12 records match but are missing the company-size field; you can include or exclude these."
- Approve and ship. You approve, and Coco writes the segment to your CRM with both the rules and a description of the original natural-language intent attached as metadata. About 8-15 credits total, depending on how many records the segment evaluates over.
For a simpler segment ("everyone in the US who downloaded the case study last month"), the cost lands at the low end. For a complex behavioral segment with five conditions and a cross-tool signal, it lands higher.
Segment maintenance
Records change. People change titles. Companies grow past size thresholds. Contacts go silent for the time window your segment requires. Static segments rot. The membership you defined three weeks ago isn't the membership the segment represents today.
Coco re-evaluates segment membership on a schedule or trigger. You set the cadence: nightly, weekly, on every relevant record change. As records enter or leave the segment, Coco updates the membership in your CRM with the same approval gates that apply at build time. By default, Coco surfaces the proposed changes and queues them for review. Once you've authorized autonomous re-eval, the segment stays synced inside the rules you approved.
The audit trail records every membership change with the trigger that caused it. So when you're three months into a campaign and someone asks why a specific contact is or isn't in the audience, the answer is recoverable, not guessed.
Specific examples
Two sample natural-language criteria with the resulting Coco-built segment:
"Expansion-stage SaaS buyers in NYC who haven't been touched in 90 days." Coco translates to: industry = SaaS, ARR or employee-count threshold matching your expansion definition, location = NYC metro, last contact > 90 days, lifecycle stage not in [opportunity, customer]. About 10 credits for build; ~140 records in the preview. You drop contacts already in active sequences elsewhere, approve, ship.
"People who downloaded the pricing PDF in the last 30 days, work at companies with 50+ employees, and haven't replied to outbound in 6 months." Coco stitches the form-fill signal, the firmographic filter, and the engagement filter. About 12 credits. Preview shows 67 contacts; two are flagged as missing engagement data and you decide whether to include. For cross-tool joins (CRM data + marketing-tool signal), the credit cost lands higher, around 15 credits, because Coco has to fetch and join across sources.
Try Coco for free → · 1,000 credits free · no card · ~2-min setup
Why this beats SQL or filter rules
The default "advanced" path for segment building is either SQL against your warehouse or the native filter builder in your CRM. Both work; both have limits.
SQL is the most flexible. The cost is the round-trip: marketer drafts criteria, sends to analytics, analytics writes the SQL, marketer reviews, criteria need adjustment, repeat. A 10-minute segment lands at 2 days. Maintaining it as criteria evolve means the same round-trip again.
Native filter rules avoid the round-trip but introduce the parsing gap above. Your phrasing has to fit the tool's mental model, and the UI gets clunky past 4-5 conditions.
Coco sits between the two. The flexibility approaches SQL because the natural-language layer can express conditions the filter UI struggles with. The round-trip collapses because the marketer is the one building the segment. The audit trail records both the human phrasing and the machine logic, so when criteria evolve, the diff is legible.
Coco builds the segment in your CRM. It doesn't replace your marketing automation platform. Campaign execution, sends, and reporting happen in the tool you already have. Coco is the build-and-maintain layer. See how Coco supports campaign launch → for the workflow that takes a segment and prepares the send, or how Coco cleans CRM data → for the upstream hygiene the segment runs against.
Frequently asked questions
Which CRMs are supported?
HubSpot and Salesforce today. Segments are built natively in each (HubSpot smart lists, Salesforce report criteria), so your existing tooling continues to work against them. If your marketing automation runs through a separate platform, Coco can build the segment in your CRM and you sync to the marketing tool from there.
Can Coco build segments using behavioral signals?
Yes, if those signals are in your CRM or in a tool Coco can read. Form fills, page visits, email engagement, product activity (where surfaced to your CRM), and cross-tool signals from connected integrations all count. The segment definition will show you which signals Coco used and where they came from.
Does the segment update automatically?
Yes, at the cadence you set. Nightly is the most common; for high-velocity segments (e.g., real-time MQL routing), Coco can re-eval on every relevant record change. Membership updates queue for approval by default; you can authorize autonomous re-eval once you're comfortable with how the segment behaves.
Can I share segments across my team?
Team tier supports shared segments with admin audit. The natural-language definition and the translated filter logic are visible to anyone with access, so teammates can understand the segment's intent, not just its rules.
Will Coco overwrite existing segments?
No. Coco creates new segments unless you've explicitly approved replacement of a named segment. If you want to refine an existing segment, you describe the change, Coco shows the diff in membership before applying, and you approve the update.
Get started
Connect your CRM, describe a segment you've been meaning to build, and watch the translation. The 1,000 free credits cover roughly 60-120 segment builds on the Hobby tier, enough to evaluate whether the natural-language layer matches how your team thinks about audiences.
Try Coco for free → · 1,000 credits free · no card · ~2-min setup
Or book a walkthrough → if you'd rather see a sample build first.