Audiences
Overview
An audience answers "who gets this". It comes in two shapes, and the difference is not a matter of taste:
- Static — a frozen membership list. Whoever is in stays in until somebody changes it. Right
for efforts that have to be reproducible.
- Dynamic — a filter rule over contacts and leads. It is evaluated afresh on every send and
grows with the data.
An audience is resolved deduplicated and only over entries with a valid email address: the same address on a contact and on a lead produces one recipient, not two.
Core tasks
Create an audience. Pick the shape and name it. For dynamic audiences the filter rule is the actual content.
Audience without a condition. A dynamic audience without a condition matches every contact and lead — with a brand set, all of that brand plus all without a brand. That is allowed (say “All contacts” for an announcement to everyone) but rarely intended. The list marks such audiences with Matches everyone, the edit dialog warns, and before a campaign starts or an SMS campaign is sent the note appears once more. Nothing is changed automatically.
Filter by industry and last contact. Two conditions answer the typical prospecting questions:
- Industry — for a lead its own industry, for a contact the industry of its customer (company).
"equals" compares exactly, "contains" ignores upper and lower case.
- Last contact (CRM activity) — the most recent CRM activity: call, meeting, note, email. It counts
the time it was done, otherwise when it was created; a meeting planned in the future is not yet a contact. For a contact, activities on its customer count too. Choose within the last … days or longer ago than … days (1 to 3650). Anyone never contacted counts as "longer ago" — so a reactivation campaign also reaches the forgotten ones.
Because a rule is re-evaluated on every send, "longer ago than 90 days" stays correct without anyone updating a date.
Enforce consent. Each audience can carry a hard consent gate. The send then reaches only addresses with confirmed marketing consent — on top of the checks that run anyway.
Check the recipients. Resolution shows who actually ends up in the set — before the send, not after.
Use it. Audiences are selected in the email campaign and in the campaign wizard.
Fields in detail
The What it does column answers what changes in the system — not what the field is called. The grey name behind the label is the API field: the same thing runs under that name through automation, import and AI tools.
Creating and editing an audience
| Field | Required | Values / format | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
Name name | yes | text | What the audience is called in the selection. |
Kind kind | yes | fixed list or rule | The difference that matters. A fixed list contains exactly the people you put in it. A rule is evaluated afresh on every send — it grows and shrinks with the data without anyone maintaining it. |
Rule filterRule | with "rule" | conditions | What is selected on — lead status, source, company, position, department, industry, last contact, tags, score, behaviour and custom fields. The preview shows before saving how many people it hits. |
Members members | with "fixed list" | several contacts | Who belongs to it. |
Consent required consentRequired | no | yes/no | Whether only people with a valid consent are included. For advertising to private individuals this is not a choice but the precondition — off is only defensible for purely informational messages to existing customers. |
Brand brandId | no | one of your brands | Which brand the audience applies to. A consent applies per brand, not across the house. |
Snapshot from snapshotSource | — | read-only, e.g. HubSpot | Shown when an import created an active list with a rule that cannot be rebuilt as a fixed list (marked "Snapshot from HubSpot" in the list, date in snapshotAt). The members are frozen. Own conditions: set the kind to "Dynamic" and define the rule — it replaces the frozen list, the marker disappears, and a repeated import leaves the audience unchanged. |
Matches everyone matchesAll | — | read-only, yes/no | Yes when the audience is dynamic and has no condition. It then reaches every contact and lead (with a brand: all of that brand plus all without a brand). Marked in the list, warned about in the dialog and before sending; nothing is changed automatically. Through the API, ?id=<number> finds exactly the audience with that number (like audienceId on campaigns). |
Settings & permissions
- Module
module.marketing. marketing.campaign.manage— create and maintain audiences; the same right as for campaigns and
templates. Pre-assigned to the role Vertrieb.
- The audience does not decide about the send. Consent and suppression are checked by the send
itself — the audience only supplies the set, see Consent & suppression.
FAQ & troubleshooting
The audience has 500 members but only 380 were sent to. That is the normal case: missing consent, suppression entries and duplicate addresses are subtracted at send time.
An address appears twice. Not in the send — deduplication happens by address, across contact and lead boundaries too.
The dynamic audience changes between two sends. By design. To reach the same set twice, use a static list.
A contact without an email address is missing. Without a valid address there is no recipient — it is skipped during resolution.