What this helps you do
Audiences group your customers so a message reaches the people it fits. You always have one All Customers audience that reaches everyone connected and cannot be deleted. Onboarding seeds a small starter set you can rename, archive or replace, covering the cuts most stores have: service customers, sales and new arrivals, parts and accessories, events and clinics, a VIP and owners club you curate, and your staff. Open audiences appear as choices on each customer's preferences page; closed ones such as VIP and staff are yours to assign and are never shown to customers.
When to use it
Use audiences whenever a message fits some customers and not others: the service drive is closed this morning, a courtesy recall note for the affected owners you have a connection with, a new arrival for the people who asked to be told, an owner clinic, a parts and accessories note, a shift message for staff, or one audience per store in a group.
How to do it
- Open Audiences.
- Create audiences named the way a customer would pick them: Truck Owners, EV Owners, Fleet & Commercial, or one per store.
- Choose how people join each one: customers choose it themselves, the dealership assigns them, or either. Set VIP & Owners Club and Staff to dealership assigns.
- Let customers pick the open lists on the preferences page, and use Bulk assign from Connections to build the owners club.
- To group customers inside an interest, set Inside audience to a parent, for example Fleet & Commercial inside Service Customers.
- Decide per audience whether replies to its Blasts are allowed; leave replies on for anything a customer would answer, such as a pickup time or an appointment change.
Example
A snow warning closes the service drive until ten. The service manager sends it to Service Customers rather than All Customers, so the 900 people with a car in for work or an appointment that morning hear it and nobody who bought from you three years ago is woken up. The same week, twelve people on a Truck Owners audience hear that the configuration they asked about finally landed.
Good to know
- VIP & Owners Club is a list you curate, not a spend or equity rule: there are no rule-based or dynamic audiences, and the Hub does not read your DMS, your CRM or your inventory. Assign the customers you want there.
- An audience is not a recall list. The Hub has no vehicle, VIN or repair-order data, so an affected-owner audience is one you build and maintain yourself, and it never replaces the manufacturer's own notification.
- Sending to All Customers asks for a step-up confirmation first.
- A customer can be in several audiences at once: service, truck owners and the owners club.
- In a group, a store's manager can be limited to that store's audiences on the Team screen, both for sending and for reading replies.