Referencing audiences

When creating campaign files or customer segments for analysis, a subset of customers is continually referenced in most or all customer selections. These audiences can define active customers, frequent spenders, dormant customers, or master exclusion lists such as complainers, do not contacts, marketing preferences, or deceased lists. This criteria for selecting customers is usually recorded and updated in one central place as includes or excludes (suppression lists) for campaigning or analysis. You can use the search function to find and add an audience to new or existing audiences.

The benefits of referencing audiences within new or existing audiences are:

• The ability to create and maintain one audience as the master copy, to be used in all audiences as required
• The flexibility to change an audience and have that change automatically apply to the audiences where it's referenced
• The ability to reference multiple audiences within one audience, to ensure consistent criteria is applied
• The ability to reference a read-only version of an audience that's been shared with you, as criteria within your own audience
• Peace of mind that any audiences which include these audiences are consistently selecting the same people as the basis of the selection

Audience in a dashboard filter¶

You can use an audience to filter a dashboard, for example a list of "active customers" - in this case, customers who have made at least one booking in the last three years.

To add an audience to a dashboard:

1. Open the dashboard in Edit mode.
2. In the Filters area, click the AND icon.
3. Click in the Search box.
4. Select the Audiences tab in the Search data form.

5. Select the audience to add and click Apply.

   The dashboard filter now includes the "Active Customers" audience. In the audiences area, you can see that the referenced audience, "Active Customers", has a dependent and is also set to read-only.

6. To change the audience, click the Unlock icon.

7. Click the Dependency drop-down to view the resource that depends on this audience.

Referencing an audience in an audience¶

You can reference one or more audiences from within an existing audience. A referenced audience can itself reference another audience.

This example shows how to add an exclusion list, "Do Not Contacts", to the Exclude segment.

1. If the audience is Locked, click the Unlock icon.
2. In the Search data area, click the AND icon.
3. Click in the Search box.
4. Select the Audiences tab of the Search data form and choose an audience.
5. Click Apply to add the audience.

The selected audience is now referenced in this audience.