September 10, 2026 · The lunalink.ai team

Should Shopify merchants use the same customer segments for email and SMS?

Man multitasking with a smartphone and laptop while sitting on a sofa indoors, top view. — Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels

A customer can be a loyal buyer, live near your store, and have looked at a product yesterday.

Those facts may make them a good fit for your next campaign. They do not tell you whether you can email them, text them, or both.

That is the difference between a shared audience idea and a send list.

For most Shopify stores, the right answer is: build one core audience definition, then create separate email and SMS versions of it.

Sentira is built around that model. It keeps customer data in one profile, so you can use the same purchase and behaviour data across channels. But email and SMS campaigns still need their own consent and delivery rules.

Start with the customer fact, not the channel

A segment should first answer a plain business question.

Say you want to tell returning customers about a new product in a category they have bought before. Your core audience might be:

Customers who have placed at least one order
Customers who bought from that category
Customers who have not ordered recently
Customers in a location where you can ship the product

That is useful logic for both email and SMS. It keeps the campaign relevant.

Shopify segments are dynamic, rule-based customer lists. A customer joins when they match the rules and leaves when they no longer do. That means a customer who places an order can automatically leave a pre-purchase promotion segment, if that is how you set it up.

The shared core is worth keeping consistent. Otherwise, email and SMS can start telling different stories to different parts of your customer base by accident.

But shared relevance is not shared permission.

Email consent is not SMS consent

A phone number on a customer profile is not SMS marketing permission.

Shopify treats email and SMS consent separately. Customers must opt in to SMS on its own. Shopify automatically excludes phone numbers without SMS consent from SMS campaigns.

The same is true in the other direction. A customer record alone does not make someone eligible for email marketing. Shopify Messaging filters out people who have not accepted email marketing.

This is easy to miss because checkout gathers both kinds of contact details in one place. The permissions are still different. Shopify says email marketing consent may be preselected in recommended regions, while the SMS opt-in checkbox cannot be preselected.

That setup reflects a simple rule: a customer should make an active choice about text marketing.

So do not make one segment called “VIP customers” and send it through both channels without checking the channel rules. Make two versions instead.

For example:

VIP customers — email: your VIP and purchase criteria, plus email marketing consent
VIP customers — SMS: the same VIP and purchase criteria, plus SMS marketing consent

The names can be this plain. What matters is that someone on your team can see the difference before scheduling a send.

Use AND logic, not OR logic

The safest way to build these segments is to treat consent as a required condition.

Your email version needs:

Your core customer criteria
AND email marketing consent

Your SMS version needs:

The same core customer criteria
AND SMS subscription status of `SUBSCRIBED`

Shopify provides an `sms_subscription_status` filter. Its values include `SUBSCRIBED`, `PENDING`, `UNSUBSCRIBED`, and `NOT_SUBSCRIBED`.

For a marketing send, `SUBSCRIBED` is the useful condition to check.

Do not join email consent and SMS consent with OR. That can create a list of people who agreed to one channel but not the one you are sending.

Klaviyo documents the same approach for shared profiles: email, SMS, and push have separate consent statuses, and channel conditions should be combined with `AND` rather than `OR`.

You can check this in under a minute. Open one of your current segments and read the final consent rule. If it says “email or SMS subscribed,” it is not a channel-specific send list.

Engagement rules should differ too

Consent decides whether a customer can receive a marketing message. Engagement helps you decide whether they should receive this one.

Email and SMS produce different signals.

For email, Shopify segments can use activity such as `opened`, `clicked`, `bounced`, and `unsubscribed`. An email audience might exclude people who have not opened or clicked a recent run of emails, depending on your sending plan.

SMS needs its own check. A customer can be engaged by text and ignore email, or regularly open email and never want a text. Their behaviour in one channel does not stand in for behaviour in the other.

Shopify’s Smart delivery reflects this split. For larger send lists, it can filter people who have not interacted with recent emails and SMS subscribers with inactive phone numbers.

There is one important limit. Smart delivery only filters when the send list has more than 1,000 subscribers. At 1,000 or fewer, Shopify says the campaign goes to all subscribers in the selected segment, even if Smart delivery is on.

That means your own segment rules matter most for a smaller list. Do not rely on a send setting to correct an audience that was too broad when you built it.

Keep the journey shared when it helps

Separate segments do not mean you need separate customer journeys for every idea.

A customer abandoning a cart is still in the same journey, whether they can receive email, SMS, or both. Shopify Messaging supports email and SMS for abandoned product browse, abandoned cart, and abandoned checkout automations.

The channel can change based on consent. The trigger and business purpose can stay the same.

Other journeys are channel-specific from the start. Shopify’s “Welcome new subscribers with a discount email” automation is email-only. That is a reminder to check the automation itself, not only the segment behind it.

In Sentira, a unified customer profile gives you one view of the customer. Their orders, behaviour, and subscription choices sit together. The campaign or flow should still choose a channel based on that customer’s permission for that channel.

One profile is useful. One identical send list is not.

A practical segment pattern to use

For a campaign aimed at customers who bought in the last year but not recently, set up this pattern:

1. Define the shared audience: customers with a past purchase, excluding recent buyers. 2. Save an email version with email marketing consent. 3. Save an SMS version with `sms_subscription_status = SUBSCRIBED`. 4. Add email engagement rules only to the email version. 5. Add SMS-specific delivery checks only to the SMS version. 6. Review the estimated audience count before every send.

This gives you a consistent campaign idea without treating two different permissions as interchangeable.

The quiet next step is to open your next email and SMS campaign side by side. Compare the underlying customer rules, then compare the consent rules. The first should mostly match. The second should not.

Sources

shopifyemail marketingsms marketingcustomer segments