Defining Campaign Targets

There are four related components that are used to determine who the customers are that will be contacted by the campaign and how they will be contacted:

Conversations
Audience Models
Segmentation Models
Suppression Lists

The conversation represents the entire pool of customers that could possibly be targeted by the campaign. This numerically represents the "best-case scenario" of the customers that could be reached by the campaign. Consider the conversation to be the super-set of possible customers that can be reached by the campaign.

The audience model is a subset of the conversation that represents only those customers that will be reached by the campaign. This will include customers that opted in to the conversation specifically. The audience model will also exclude customers that are on "do not mail" lists, in a state or province where the campaign does not apply, etc. You are able to create filters that remove customers from the audience that should not be contacted by the campaign. From these exclusions the remaining customers that are able to be contacted represent the audience.

The segmentation model is used to divide your audience into distinct groups for messaging separately, as each segment requires its own content. For example, you may wish to segment your audience by their address's state or province. This allows you to tailor content specific to the specific segments (e.g. legal copy content that is required for each state or province).

Note: The same content can be used for more than one segment if desired.

The suppression list removes customers from the conversation that do not wish to be messaged. They are removed from the campaign and will not have any communication sent to them.

Figure: Campaign, Audience, Segment Models and Supression Lists

The Targeting screen allows you to define the conversation, audience model, segmentation models and supression lists associated with the campaign. You associate, create or edit conversations, audience models. segmentation models or supression lists that are associated to the campaign.

Once a conversation and an audience are associated with the campaign and saved, the Waterfall Counts section appears, allowing you to calculate the number of customers in the entire conversation and the audience targeted for the campaign.

You are also able to add seed lists to the audience. Seed lists are lists of email addresses that will be mailed to when the campaign is launched. Seed lists typically contain people within your organization that have a vested interest or desire to audit the campaign being executed. Typically staff from marketing departments will want to be included on the seed list. For more information on seed lists, please see Establishing Seed Lists

See the following sections to define your campaign topics: