Audience List

Each Journey requires a database that contains the email addresses or phone numbers of the contacts you want to reach.

Most Journeys use an Audience list as the main list of contacts that is fed into the Journey. It is recommended that you create one Audience list rather than different lists for each mailing, or one list per brand, like some mailing platforms do.

With dynamic or static segments, audience sub-selections can be created and used in journeys. If you use many Audience lists with the same contacts in each list, the contact data can get fragmented.

For instance, if you import contacts into different audience lists for each mailing, then if a contact opts out, this opt-out setting gets stored only in Audience list 1. When you create a new audience list for a second mailing, the opt-out setting for this contact is not found and they will still receive the second mailing. They will probably not be happy that they can't opt out from your mailing list(s) and might mark you as "Spammer", which affects your mailing reputation.


In this journey, a sub-selection "Newsletter optin" (dynamic segment) from the Audience list 'Parana contacts' is chosen as audience for the email

The Audience component standard fields are as follows:

  • ID — Unique ID of the contact. Selligent Campaign always uses the ID field as unique key in all lists. Usually a USERID or PARENT_ID field is set up as foreign key to the ID field in linked lists. You can also add your own custom identifier to the audience list (e.g., CUSTOMER_ID) and link to this field in you linked list. See list relations for info on linking lists.
  • Mail — Email address of the contact. Selligent Campaign will always send the email to the value in the field. It cannot be customized in the editor (e.g., use field MAIL2).

IMPORTANT NOTE: The Mail field has a default length of 50. The field length can be modified by the user. However any changes made must consider performance, and should not exceed a length which remains realistic for an email address (e.g., 100). Anything longer is most likely not a valid email.

  • Name — Name of the contact. You can create your own custom fields to store the name (e.g., FIRSTNAME and LASTNAME). Usually this field holds the last name or full name of the contact.
  • Optout — Indicates if the contact is subscribed or not. 0 or NULL indicates that the contact is opted in (subscribed). All other values indicate an unsubscribe. Default values are used for an automatic optout:
    • 9 — List unsubscribe
    • 911 — Complaint
    • 10 — Email quality unsubscribe.  This default value can be changed in the list properties, "email quality"

    • Technical Note: In some cases, users are wrongly unsubscribed because of spam detection tools that hit every link in a message to validate for example the domain. These hits are GET requests and should not lead to an unsubscribe of the user. To avoid this, unsubscribe should only happen when the user clicks the Unsubscribe link and POSTS the result. Only when the Unsubscribe link is used in a journey where a custom optout is included, the GET request will result in an unsubscribe for the user.

  • Test-user — If set to 1, the contact will be selected as a test user when testing journeys and messages
  • Only-text — If set to 1, the contact will only receive the text version of the email. Email views are not registered because the tracking pixel is an image, thus not included in the text version.
  • Optout-source — The reason why the contact opted out. For custom values, the field is not filled in automatically by the system.
  • Subscribe_source — The source through which the contact subscribed. For custom values, this field is not filled in automatically by the system.
  • Created_DT — Creation date of the contact. Filled in automatically with each insert.
  • Modified_DT — Date on which the contact was updated.Filled in automatically with each update..
  • Optout_DT — Date on which the contact opted out.Filled in automatically when the value for the field OPTOUT changes.

Technical Note: The table name of an Audience list starts with USERS_

When “Email Quality” is configured for an Audience list, two additional fields are added to the table: BOUNCECNT and BOUNCEDT. It is very important to have "email quality" activated on an Audience list. It ensures bounces and syntax errors are handled properly. Check out the topic Email quality for more details.

 

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