A Workaround for More Granular Customer.io Segmentation
by Mariana Santiago | October 22, 2025
Have you ever wanted to create a segment of people who’ve completed a particular event within a shorter period of time than one day in customer.io?
If so, this article is for you. If not, you’re about to learn how to do so anyway!
Customer.io is a little annoying in that it doesn’t let you segment your audience by event completion in time increments less than a day.
Above, we have a picture of the customer.io segment builder. Let’s say you want to narrow your audience to people who have opened the app within the last 30 minutes, because you’d like to exclude those people from receiving a particular broadcast.
Here’s another use case: you’d like to create an abandoned cart campaign in customer.io. People should enter the campaign when they start checkout and receive their first reminder email 30 minutes after entering checkout, UNLESS they’ve placed an order some time in the last 30 minutes.
You can’t clarify that you’d only like people who’ve performed the placed order event within the last 30 minutes excluded from the campaign. It’s simply “placed order HAS been performed” or “HAS NOT been performed.” There’s no field available in which to clarify that you only want people who’ve performed that event in the LAST 30 MINUTES to be excluded.
Here’s how we get around that, friends.
Step 1: Create a manual list.
For the sake of this tutorial, we’re going to focus on creating a segment of people who’ve opened your app in the last 30 minutes.
Click on Segments in the left-hand toolbar. Once you navigate there, there should be a button in the upper right-hand corner saying “Create Segment.” Click it and choose MANUAL segment. Don’t add anyone. Don’t configure it. Just name it “People Who’ve Opened the App in the Last 30 Minutes” and you’re done.
Step 2: Create a campaign.
Call the campaign “Segmenting People Who Have Opened the App Within The Last 30 Minutes.”
The trigger should be the event Application Opened. Do not include any filters. As for frequency, select “A person can enter this campaign: On every event.”
Step 3: Add the remaining steps.
Immediately after the trigger, the first step should be “Manual Segment Update”. Add all campaign entrants to the “Opened the App in the Last 30 Minutes” manual segment you just created.
Next, add a 30 minute time delay.
Finally, add another “Manual Segment Update” – this time removing people from the “Opened the App in the Last 30 Minutes” manual segment. When you’re done, your campaign workflow should look like this:
And there you go! You couldn’t have created a data-driven segment strictly for people who’ve performed a specific event in the last 30 minutes, but you can do it with manual segments and a little out-of-the-box automation thinking.
Pretty nifty, right?