Audiences and segments

Open Marketing and go to Audiences.

An audience is a set of conditions over your customers, contacts and leads — the same condition builder as elsewhere in the app, including your own custom fields: Filter a list.

1. 1Create an audience and give it a name that says who is in it.
2. 2Build the conditions.
3. 3Check the size before you use it anywhere.

It stays live. Somebody who becomes a customer tomorrow enters the audience tomorrow; somebody who unsubscribes leaves it. That is the whole reason to build a rule rather than export a spreadsheet — a list exported on Monday is wrong by Friday, and worse, it will keep emailing people who asked you to stop.

Name it after the rule, not the campaign. "Norwegian customers, no purchase in 12 months" survives; "Spring mailout" tells the next person nothing about who is in it.

Narrower is better. A message written for everybody is read by nobody, and a large audience makes every deliverability problem larger. If you cannot write the first sentence differently for this audience than for another, the two are the same audience.

Consent is applied on top, always. People who have not agreed to marketing, or who have unsubscribed, are excluded regardless of what the conditions say. So an audience size and a send size can legitimately differ — that is the safeguard working. See Consent, unsubscribes and deliverability.

Scoring ranks people within an audience by how engaged they are, which is what turns "10,000 contacts" into a call list worth working. Use it to decide who gets a person's attention rather than another email.