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 groups most stores have: your regulars, a VIP list you curate, a new arrivals and restocks list, an events and classes list, a sales and clearance list, 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: first access for your top tier, a restock for the people who asked about that department, a class for the customers who take classes, a clearance note only for the people who opted into sales, a shift note for staff, and one audience per location for a small chain. A closure or a change of hours is one of the few things that genuinely goes to everyone.
How to do it
- Open Audiences.
- Create audiences named the way customers would pick them: Workshops, Home & Kitchen, Denim, or one per store.
- Choose how people join each one: customers choose it themselves, the store assigns them, or either. Set VIP and staff to store assigns.
- Let customers pick the open lists on the preferences page, and use Bulk assign from Connections to build your VIP list.
- To group customers inside an interest, set Inside audience to a parent, for example Workshops inside your events list.
- Decide per audience whether replies to its Blasts are allowed; leave replies on for anything a customer would ask you to hold.
Example
Forty pairs of a limited run land on Tuesday. You send them to VIP first with a YES or NO reply so you know how many to set aside, and the next morning the rest go to New Arrivals & Restocks. The customers who care hear it first, and the people who only ever wanted your holiday hours are not interrupted.
Good to know
- VIP is a list you curate, not a spend rule: there are no rule-based or dynamic audiences, and the Hub does not read your point of sale or your online store. Assign the customers you want there.
- Sending to All Customers asks for a step-up confirmation first.
- A customer can be in several audiences at once: regulars, new arrivals and VIP.
- Holds and pickups are not an audience. Those are one-to-one notes your staff sends from Conversations to one person.
- Store managers can be limited to their own store's audiences on the Team screen, both for sending and for reading replies.