Overview

Segmentation is a crucial tool to help you send the right message to the right person at the right time. For that reason, we created the Audience Builder. You can query all your data in one tool, build complex audience rules, and see the results in real-time. The Audience Builder features powerful audience linking (also called audience nesting) capabilities to help you effectively manage complex segments.

The Audience Builder

Cordial's Audience Builder is used throughout the platform to search contacts, send messages, save and recall audiences, build Audience Trend reports, and filter results in Event Dashboards and event data reports. Audiences are built using one or more rules that enable you to query all the data in your account.

1. To create an audience, log in to Cordial and navigate to Contacts > Audiences and select New.

2. The Audience Builder will appear.

• Learn more about creating and saving audiences here.

3. Click or drag audience rules to create your audience and configure the desired segmentation.

Audience rule definitions

You can use one or multiple audience rules to create dynamic segments of contacts.

• You can find a complete list of available audience rules and their definitions here.

Example segmentations

Some example segmentations you can perform using the Audience Builder include:

• Geography
• Age
• Gender
• Industry
• Job title
• Education level
• Past purchases
• Buying frequency
• Engagement
• Birthdays and anniversaries
• Email type
• Device type
• Open type
• Cart items
• Browse behavior

The list could go on and on, but you get the point.

• You can learn more about the Audience Builder here.

Linked audiences

Linked audiences (also called nested audiences) are saved audiences created and referenced (linked) into any message—batch, automations, and/or orchestrations. Any changes made to the original saved audience will cascade to wherever that audience is used, which is extremely helpful for scheduled messages, recurring automations, and behavioral triggers.

In short, you can create your audience once and link the audience into any message or data job.

Create a linked audience

From within any message, click Edit in the Audience pane to build your audience. In the Audience Builder, click the Audiences tab to display all saved audiences. You can drag in any saved audiences.

If you want to change your saved audience, navigate to the saved audience list—Contacts > Audiences—to make the change. The change will be applied everywhere the audience is used.

Delete a linked audience

Saved audiences can be removed from the audience list page if they're not linked. If the audience is linked with another audience, you need to go into each of the places where the linked audience is used and manually remove it. You can then delete the saved audience.

Segmentation and personalization

Segmentation is only one piece of the puzzle. The power of Cordial's personalization should not be overlooked because it can take the place of segmentation in some situations, reducing the need for unnecessary message clutter.

Use case

You could create two separate messages that are each segmented according to gender—or you could create one message and use Cordial's template syntax (Smarty) to display conditional content based on the contact's gender. This example can be further extended to include other contact attributes such as language preferences or purchase history. The more you take advantage of personalization, the less you'll need to rely on segmentation and multiple messages.

More data = better messaging

The more data you collect, the more powerful your segmentation and personalization can be.  Make sure to capture all available data points such as contact attributes, events, products, and purchases. Work with your developers to make sure you're capturing as much data as possible. 

• You can learn more about data management here.