Sending to a random cohort of your audience

Random cohort sending lets you send an email post to a randomly selected portion of your audience instead of your full list. You can cap the send at a percentage or a fixed number of recipients, and exclude anyone who already received specific past posts, making it easy to run controlled sends, test content with a sample, or reach fresh readers with each campaign.

• Both controls live on the Audience page of the Post Builder, under your Email Audience selections. Learn more about the options on the Audience page of the post flow.
• The random cohort is drawn from whatever email audience you’ve already selected, with subscriber tiers, plus any segments you’ve included or excluded. Exclusions from past posts are applied first, and the send size limit is applied to whoever remains.
• Recipients are chosen at random each time. Two limited sends to the same audience can reach different subscribers, which is exactly what makes this useful for rotating through your list.
• These settings only affect the email version of your post. Your web audience is not changed. If the post is published to the web, it remains visible to your selected web audience.

Use the Limit send size toggle when you want the post to go to a random sample of your audience rather than everyone in it.

1. From your beehiiv dashboard, create a new post or open a draft. The post editor opens on the Compose page. Write your post and go through your normal workflows. 
2. Once your post is set up as you wish, click Next to move on to the Audience page.
   
   
3. On the Audience page, under Email Audience, select the subscriber tiers and any segments you want to include or exclude, as you would for any post.
4. Next, toggle on Limit send size.
   
   
   
5. Choose how to cap the send: Percentage of recipients or Fixed number of recipients.
   
   
6. Enter a whole number in the field. Helper text below the field updates to show how many recipients will receive the post, as well as note if the number of recipients is too low for meaningful results.
   
   
   
7. Click Next to continue through the post flow, then schedule or publish from the Review page as usual. The Email Audience summary reflects your limited send size.

Use Exclude recipients from past posts when you don’t want to email subscribers who already received certain sends. An example would be readers who got a previous edition of the same sponsored campaign.
 

1. On the Audience page, toggle on Exclude recipients from past posts.
2. Click the Published posts dropdown and select the posts whose recipients you want to exclude. You can select up to 10 posts.
   
   
3. Review the recipient counts shown next to each selected post to confirm the impact on your audience.
   
   
4. Continue through the post flow and publish as usual.

You can use either control on its own or combine them. When both are enabled, beehiiv builds the final email audience in this order:

1. Starts with your selected Email Audience (subscriber tiers plus included/excluded segments).
2. Removes anyone who received the posts you selected under Exclude recipients from past posts.
3. Randomly selects recipients from the remaining audience, up to your Limit send size cap.

Example:  with an audience of 100,000 subscribers, one past post excluded that reached 40,000 of them, and a fixed send size of 10,000.  The post goes to 10,000 subscribers chosen at random from the 60,000 who didn’t receive the excluded post.

• Rotate sponsored sends across your list:Send each sponsored campaign to a fixed number of subscribers and exclude recipients of the previous editions, so every send reaches fresh readers and your inventory stretches further.
• Test content with a sample: Send a new format or topic to 10% of your list before committing to a full send.
• Protect engagement on experimental sends: Limit higher-risk campaigns to a small random slice so a miss doesn’t affect deliverability across your whole audience.
• Manage send frequency: If you publish often, cap individual sends so no single subscriber is overwhelmed while your full list still hears from you over time.