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Every email campaign needs an audience — the group of people who will receive it. Marketing and transactional campaigns pull from different pools of data, and each supports different ways of narrowing that pool to the right recipients.

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Marketing audiences vs. transactional audiences

Marketing campaigns draw from your full customer database: everyone who has registered for any of your events. However, only participants who have actively opted in to receive marketing emails from you are eligible to receive a marketing campaign. The dashboard shows your opted-in subscriber count on the marketing campaigns list — this is your reachable marketing audience, and it may be significantly smaller than your total participant count. Transactional campaigns draw from the participant startlist for a specific event. Because transactional emails relate directly to an event the participant is registered for — not to marketing or promotions — they are sent regardless of the participant’s marketing email preference. The audience pool for a transactional campaign is everyone registered for that event. A participant is opted in when they have agreed to receive marketing emails from you. Participants usually opt in through the marketing question on your registration form. Only opted-in people can receive a marketing campaign. People you add in an imported audience are also opted in to your marketing emails.
By uploading a list, you confirm that you have permission to send marketing email to every person on it. Only upload people who have agreed to hear from you.
Unsubscribes always stick. If someone has unsubscribed from your marketing emails, uploading them again in a list doesn’t opt them back in.

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Configuring the audience for a campaign

The Audience step of the campaign wizard is where you decide which participants within the eligible pool actually receive the email.

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Full eligible pool

For a marketing campaign, if you don’t set an audience, the campaign is sent to everyone who has opted in to your marketing emails. If you choose Audience Builder and add no filters, you’re asked to confirm that you want to send to your full audience before you continue. The Launch step will show the estimated recipient count before you confirm.
Sending to your full audience means everyone in the pool receives the email. If that is wider than you intend, use an imported audience or add filters before sending.

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Imported CSV

If you have a contact list you’ve uploaded, select Imported CSV and choose the audience from the dropdown. For example, it might be a list of participants from a previous year or a list from a partner. You upload and manage these lists under Marketing & Comms → Audience → Imported audiences. See Imported audiences. Imported CSV isn’t offered for a campaign that is linked to a specific event. An audience that is still processing, or whose import failed, can’t be sent to. Wait until its status shows Imported. You can also configure exclusions alongside an imported audience — a second list of participants to remove from the import before sending. This is useful for removing participants who have already received a certain communication or who should not receive this particular email.

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Audience Builder

Select Audience Builder to narrow the audience using criteria based on participant data. You can add multiple filter conditions and combine them to target a specific subset. For a marketing campaign, you can filter by:
  • Event or occurrence — participants of a specific event, or a specific occurrence of a repeating event.
  • Membership — whether a participant is part of an active membership with you.
  • Age — calculated on the day the email is sent.
  • Gender, Language, Race distance, and Demographic details.
For a transactional campaign, you can filter the event’s participants by event or occurrence. Campaigns created before the Audience Builder may show a Segment Filter option instead. Those filters are read-only. To change them, switch the campaign to Audience Builder. After applying filters, the Audience step shows an estimated count of how many participants match. This is an estimate — the exact send count is calculated at the moment the campaign is dispatched.

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Participant email experience

A participant’s experience depends on the campaign type:
  • Marketing email: they receive it only if they have opted in. An unsubscribe link in the footer lets them opt out at any time.
  • Transactional email: they receive it as a registered participant of the event. Transactional emails do not include an unsubscribe link — participants cannot opt out of them through the email itself.
If a participant asks why they received (or did not receive) an email, check their marketing preferences on their profile in the Customers section of your dashboard. For transactional emails, confirm they are active on the event’s participant list.