What this helps you do
Audiences group your customers by what they want to hear about, so a message reaches the people it is relevant to. You always have one All Customers audience that reaches everyone connected and cannot be deleted. Onboarding seeds five interests most dealerships share whatever they sell: Shopping & Availability (tell me when what I am looking for arrives), Service, Parts & Accessories, Owner Updates (seasonal notes, campaign courtesy notes, owner information) and Events (clinics, demo days, open houses). On top of those you create the interests your dealership actually runs on, named the way a customer would pick them: a product line, a department, a brand you carry, or one per location. Open audiences appear as choices on each customer's preferences page, so customers sort themselves; you can also assign customers to any audience by hand from Customers. A customer can be in as many as they like, and most owners are in several.
When to use it
Use audiences whenever a message fits some customers and not others, which at a dealership is most of the time: the unit somebody asked you to watch for, a service closure that only matters to people with work in the shop this week, a seasonal parts note, a manufacturer campaign courtesy note for the owners you believe are affected, a demo day, a clinic. Owner Updates carries the news a customer wants for as long as they own what you sold them. A holiday closure across every department is one of the few things that genuinely goes to All Customers, and the Hub asks you to confirm that send.
How to do it
- Open Audiences.
- Keep the five starter interests, or rename them in your dealership's words, and add the product lines, departments or locations customers would choose by name: Compact Tractors, Pontoons, ATVs & UTVs, Trucks & Commercial, or one per store.
- Choose how people join each one: customers choose it themselves, the dealership assigns them, or either. Interests should stay open so customers can pick them; a list you curate by hand, such as new owners this month or your commercial accounts, can be set to the dealership assigns and is never shown on the preferences page.
- Send customers to the preferences page to choose their interests, and use Bulk assign from Customers when someone tells you at the counter what they want to hear about.
- To group interests inside a broader one, set Inside audience to a parent, for example Owner Clinics inside Events.
- Decide per audience whether replies to its Blasts are allowed; leave replies on for anything a customer would answer, such as an offered service slot or the unit they asked about.
Example
A used compact tractor with a loader comes in on trade. The sales manager sends a photograph to Shopping & Availability with a YES or NO reply, and follows up each YES by hand. The same week the service manager tells Service that the shop is closed Saturday morning for a training day, and the parts manager tells Parts & Accessories that the season's blades and filters are on the shelf. Not three messages to every customer you ever sold to: three messages to the customers who wanted them.
Good to know
- Audiences are lists that customers choose or you assign. There are no rule-based or dynamic audiences, and the Hub does not read your dealer management system, your CRM or your inventory. Nobody is sorted by what they bought, what they owe or how many hours are on the meter.
- An audience is not a campaign or recall list. The Hub holds no VIN, serial, hours or mileage data, so an affected-owner audience is one you build and maintain yourself, and a note to it sits beside the manufacturer's own notification, never instead of it.
- Sending to All Customers asks for a step-up confirmation first, on purpose: a dealership's news is rarely for everyone.
- A customer can be in several audiences at once: shopping, service, one product line and the owners you added at delivery.
- A ready note, a part that is in or a status update is not an audience. Those are one-to-one notes your team sends from Conversations to one person.
- Managers can be limited to their own audiences on the Team screen, both for sending and for reading replies, so the parts manager reaches Parts & Accessories and the sales manager reaches Shopping & Availability.