The Scenario
You are a marketing strategist at a SaaS company. The email team is rebuilding how they segment the list. You have a Google Sheet with 8 audience segments defined — name in column A, filter condition in column B. Examples: "Opened last 3 campaigns," "Custom field: plan = Pro," "No clicks in 90 days," "Signup date before 2025-01-01."
Creating each segment in BigMailer means navigating to the brand, opening the segments UI, clicking through the condition builder for each one, saving, and repeating. Eight segments, eight trips through the UI.
The slow version:
- Navigate to BigMailer, open the segments tab
- Click "Create segment"
- Configure the filter condition by hand
- Save, copy the segment ID if you need it later
- Repeat seven more times
- Realize the fourth condition had a typo and the segment is matching the wrong contacts
- You spend the afternoon debugging a segment that should have taken five minutes.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the segment definitions from the sheet and creates each one via the BigMailer API.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each row in my sheet (segment name in column A, condition description in column B), create a BigMailer segment in brand ID from cell E1 and write the segment ID back into column C. Report any rows where the condition could not be parsed.
SheetXAI reads each row, interprets the condition description, calls the BigMailer segment API with the right filter structure, and writes the segment ID back into column C.
What You Get
8 BigMailer segments created with IDs written back into the sheet:
- Column C — segment ID for each row
- Error flags — any rows where SheetXAI could not parse the condition, with the reason
- Audit trail — the sheet now has a permanent name-to-ID mapping you can reference later
Column C becomes the reference for downstream work. When you need to assign contacts to a segment, update a segment definition, or delete stale segments, the IDs are already in the sheet.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Segment definition sheets often have ambiguous conditions or inconsistent formatting. SheetXAI handles interpretation and creation in the same prompt.
When condition descriptions are written in plain English, not API syntax
Your strategist wrote conditions like "engaged in the last 90 days" without specifying what "engaged" means.
For each segment in this sheet, interpret the condition in column B as follows: 'engaged' means opened OR clicked in the period. Create each BigMailer segment using the brand ID in cell E1. Write the segment ID into column C and the interpreted API filter condition into column D for review.
When some segments are duplicates of existing ones
The sheet was assembled from notes across two team members and some segment names already exist in BigMailer.
Before creating each segment, check whether a segment with the same name already exists in BigMailer brand from cell E1. If it exists, write the existing segment ID into column C and "EXISTS" into column D. Only create segments where column C is currently blank. Report totals at the end.
When you want segments across multiple brands
The same 8 segments need to exist in all 5 brands you manage.
Create the segments defined in columns A and B in every BigMailer brand listed in column E. For each brand, write the resulting segment IDs into a new row in a tab named after the brand ID. Report any errors per brand.
When the sheet has segment definitions, contacts to assign, and IDs to write back, all in one pass
The team wants to create the segments and immediately populate them from a contact list in another tab.
Create all 8 segments from columns A and B in BigMailer brand from cell E1. Write the segment IDs into column C. Then look at the Contacts tab: for each contact row, check which segments their custom fields match and assign them to the right segment IDs using the IDs you just wrote. Write a summary of how many contacts were assigned to each segment.
The pattern: define it in the sheet, create it in BigMailer, and write the IDs back for every downstream operation.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a sheet with your segment definitions, then ask it to create them all in BigMailer. The BigMailer integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to sync a CRM export with upsert or the BigMailer in Google Sheets overview.