Choosing an Audience
Choose Your Audience is the wizard step that decides who a campaign sends to. Three cards are offered, and the one you pick becomes the campaign's contact source.
The Three Sources
| Source | Sends to | Where the contacts come from |
|---|---|---|
| All Contacts | Everyone in the account | The contact store |
| Segment | A group of contacts matching a set of conditions | A saved segment |
| File | A list you supply for this campaign | A file uploaded in the wizard |
The source can be changed at any point while the campaign is being created. Selecting a different card replaces the previous choice, and anything already entered for the source you are leaving is cleared. Moving away from File asks you to confirm first when there is mapping work to lose. See Changing away from a file.
All Contacts and Segment are dynamic sources: they describe the audience rather than fixing a list of recipients. A file is fixed at the point it is uploaded.
All Contacts
All Contacts sends to every contact in the account. Nothing else is selected on the step, and the audience summary appears straight away.
Contacts are added, edited and removed outside the campaign, so what All Contacts covers changes over time. A campaign created today will send to contacts added tomorrow. The contact store itself is managed by a Campaign Manager or an administrator under Contacts.
Segment
Segment narrows the audience to the contacts matching a segment's conditions. Only saved segments are listed, so a segment that is still being built is not offered.
Pick a segment from the list first. Until one is chosen there is nothing to summarise, so Review Your Audience does not appear.
Once a segment is selected, the summary also shows the segment's refresh information, so you can see how current the membership is before committing to it. Segment membership is recalculated on a schedule and can be refreshed on demand: see Refreshing a Segment.
Preview Contacts lists the contacts in the segment as a paginated list, which is the quickest way to sanity check a segment you did not build yourself.
Review Your Audience
For All Contacts and Segment, Review Your Audience summarises the audience before you continue:
| Figure | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Total Contacts | Every contact the source covers |
| SMS Reachable | Contacts that have a phone number identifier value |
| Email Reachable | Contacts that have an email identifier value |
A bar underneath splits the total into the contacts that are campaign recipients and the contacts that are excluded, and an estimated reach gives the number of recipients for the campaign's own channel. An SMS campaign reads its estimated reach from SMS Reachable, an email campaign from Email Reachable.
A contact is only reachable on a channel if it holds an identifier of the matching kind. A contact with an email address but no phone number counts towards Email Reachable and is excluded from an SMS campaign, and the reverse for a contact with only a phone number. See Identifiers for how identifiers are held against a contact.
A large Total Contacts figure with a small estimated reach usually means the contacts are reachable on the other channel. It is worth checking here rather than after a run has sent to a fraction of the audience.
An Audience with No Contacts
All Contacts and a Segment can both be used while they resolve to no contacts at all. This is deliberate: the recipients are worked out when a run starts, not when the campaign is saved, so contacts can be uploaded or a segment can be refreshed in the meantime.
The point that matters is run start. A run whose audience still resolves to no contacts will not start. See Starting a Run.
File
File uploads a list of recipients for this campaign alone. The rows go to the campaign rather than into the contact store, so nothing uploaded here is added to Contacts or available to another campaign.
A file audience has its own upload, column mapping and evaluation flow. See Contact File Audiences.
How the Audience Reaches a Run
A run against All Contacts or a Segment builds its messages when the run starts, using the most recent contact data. The figures on this step are a forecast, not a fixed recipient list, and the run's own audience summary is the one that matters at send time. See Campaign Runs.
Once a run exists, a view audience link on it opens the run's own audience page, listing the contacts behind that run. Every role that can see the campaign can open it. The link is offered for All Contacts and Segment only, since a File audience lists its recipients in the messages table instead.
Audience and Message Priority
Message priority is a property of a File audience. It comes from a column in the uploaded file, mapped per row, so the two dynamic sources have nothing to read it from.
Every message in a run against All Contacts or a Segment therefore sends at Normal priority, which is the default. Where a send needs some recipients dispatched ahead of others, a file audience with a mapped priority column is the way to do it.
Related Guidance
- Contact File Audiences. Uploading and mapping a file
- Segments. What a segment is and how conditions work
- Adding a Template. What the audience changes about personalisation
- Editing a Campaign. Which sources can be swapped after the campaign is saved