Audiences

User guide › Apps › Audiences

An audience is not a list of contacts and not an entity of its own. Nothing is copied, imported or materialised. An audience stores three things:

• a channel — Email, WhatsApp or SMS;
• one or more sources, each pointing at an entity you already have (Leads, Customers, Contacts…);
• a set of filters per source.

When a campaign fires, the audience is resolved: every source's records are read live, filtered, and the channel's identifier — the email address or the phone number — is pulled off each matching record. Those identifiers are deduped across sources and that is the send list.

The channel decides the identifier

The channel you pick at the top of the builder is not cosmetic — it decides what is extracted from each record and how it's validated.

A record whose identifier is blank or fails that check is simply not in the audience. It isn't an error and nothing warns you — it just doesn't appear in the count. That's the single most common reason a count is lower than the number of records you expected.

Building one

Marketing → Audiences, or /audiences. The list shows Name, Channel and Sources for each saved audience; New audience opens the builder.

1. Name it and pick the channel Name is required. Channel is Email, WhatsApp or SMS. Description is free text for your own benefit. Change the channel later and any source that hasn't had its identifier field set manually gets re-suggested for the new channel.
2. Add an entity as a source Add entity. Until you do, the panel reads Add one or more entities (Leads, Customers…) to pull contacts from, then filter. Pick the entity from the Entity dropdown.
3. Check the field mapping Picking an entity pre-fills two dropdowns by guessing from your field names and types. The Email field / Phone field is the one that gets extracted — the label changes with the channel. Name field is optional and only used for personalisation and for showing a human name next to the address. The pickers mark a field of the right type with ✉ or ☎ and show every other field's type after a dot, so you can see at a glance whether the guess is right.
4. Filter the source Add filter gives you a row: field, operator, value. Add as many as you need — they are joined with AND, as the builder says: records matching ALL of these.
5. Repeat for other entities Add a second source for a different entity with its own mapping and its own filters. The audience is the union of all of them, deduped.
6. Watch the preview, then save The Live preview panel on the right updates about half a second after you stop typing: a big number of deliverable emails (or phones) and a sample of the actual identifiers. Create audience — or Save on an existing one.

Filter operators

One row per condition. Two of them — is empty and is not empty — take no value, and the value box disappears when you pick them.

Multiple sources and dedupe

Sources are unioned in order, and each identifier is only ever included once. If sarah@acme.example exists on both a Leads record and a Customers record, she is one recipient — and the name and source record attached to her are the ones from whichever source is listed first. Ordering your sources therefore decides which record's data personalises her message.

The same dedupe is what makes "everyone in Leads plus everyone in Customers" safe to build without worrying about overlap.

Where audiences get used

Audiences are shared. Nothing about an audience is specific to the app that sends to it.

Omni requires Audiences: installing Omni installs Audiences too, because a journey with nobody to enrol does nothing.

Opt-outs are not part of the audience

This distinction matters when you're reconciling numbers. An audience resolves purely from your records. Each channel then applies its own suppression list to the result before sending:

• SMS — a contact who replies STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END or QUIT is suppressed; START, YES or UNSTOP re-opts them in.
• WhatsApp — a tenant-wide suppression list of phone numbers.
• Email — an unsubscribe from an audience-sourced send suppresses that email address.

So an audience of 500 can legitimately send to 480. The audience count is the number of deliverable identifiers in your data; the campaign's own report is the number actually sent.

Who can do what

Opening /audiences needs access to the Audiences app. Creating or editing one needs the Manage audiences capability on top, granted per role under Settings → Module Access. Admins pass everything.

When the number looks wrong

Where to go next