Choosing the right audience for your campaign messages is essential to successful, high-performing campaigns. When you create a campaign, you can select different audiences for each message, use the same audiences, or even retarget audience members who didn’t open or click on earlier campaign messages.
Note that you can’t create new segments in Campaign Composer, so you’ll want to create at least one dynamic segment or manual segment before you begin.
To select an audience for a campaign message:
- Next to Audience, click Edit.
- For your first campaign message, click the Who will your send your message to? dropdown and choose one or more of your segments to build your campaign’s audience.
If you select more than one segment, your campaign message will be sent to each subscriber in each segment. - (Optional) For Excluded segments, click the dropdown and choose one or more segments of subscribers who you don't want to receive messages from this campaign.
You can see an estimate of your campaign message’s audience in the lower-right corner of Campaign Composer. - Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each message in your campaign. Note that for messages after the first message, you can select segments or use retargeting options.
- Once you’re finished setting your audience, click Save. When you’re finished designing each message of your campaign, you can see the estimated recipients of each message:
Retarget previous message recipients
If you’re creating a campaign that sends more than one text or email message, you can use AI retargeting options to try and re-engage recipients again. Retargeting options use the same segments as the prior messages in the same campaign. Retargeting is a great way to ensure that you’re capturing subscribers who may be interested in your offer, but were busy or missed your initial message.
You can only use retargeting options for the second and each subsequent message in a campaign, and you can use retargeting for both text and email campaign messages. Retargeting options aren't available in single-message campaigns.
If you create a campaign that doesn’t use retargeting options and meets certain criteria, we’ll automatically generate and recommend a retargeting campaign message. You can review and optionally include this retargeting message in your campaign before you schedule it.
Retargeting options include:
- Recipients who did not click the previous message: Use to send follow-up messages to subscribers who didn’t click on any of the links
- Recipients who did not open the previous message: Email only. Available only for text or email messages if the previous message was an email. Use to send follow-up messages to email message recipients who didn’t open the previous email message.
- Recipients who clicked the previous message and did not purchase: Use to send a follow-up message to recipients who opened and clicked on a link in the previous message, but didn't complete a purchase
Choosing campaign segments
All Subscribers: Selected by default for all new campaign messages. In general, you should only send messages to All Subscribers for important messages about your brand. Because all of your subscribers will receive the campaign message, those messages won’t be well-targeted which can lead to poor performance.
Specific segments
Use the dropdown to select one or more subscriber segments to build your campaign audience. If you select more than one segment, your campaign message will be sent to each subscriber in each segment. Consider some of the following options for your campaign:
- Performance + high ROI segments: You can optimize your campaign audiences for higher performance with performance segments. Some great options include:
- Recent subscribers who haven’t made a purchase yet
- High-intent shoppers who added products to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase
- VIP subscribers who have made multiple purchases in the past
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Location-centric subscribers for local promotions, weather-dependent products, or other location-based marketing ideas
Learn more about high ROI segments here.
Narrow segments
The most successful marketing campaigns target specific subscribers for specific messages, offers, and products. How you build narrow segments will depend on the specifics of your brand, but some options include:
- Repeat purchasers of particular product types, like skincare, shoes, or music genres
- High-frequency store visitors
- Subscribers who replied to conversational text messages you created custom attributes from
- Frequent viewers of particular product types
Broad segments
Ensure that your campaign message has maximum reach by including large numbers of subscribers in each message. These segment options are great for communicating sitewide sales, holiday events, or brand announcements. Broad segments can include:
- Subscribed to email or text: All of your subscribers whom are subscribed to messaging channels
- Made a purchase on your store in the last 30 days
- Visited your site in the last 60 days
Smart Sending
Smart Sending prevents you from sending too many messages to subscribers over a short period of time. When enabled for a campaign message, Smart Sending skips message sends to any subscriber who received at least one message from you in the Smart Sending period. We recommend keeping Smart Sending enabled for all of your campaigns.
- Smart Sending is enabled for all campaign email and text messages by default
- By default, Smart Sending limits each subscriber from receiving more than one message from you every 8 hours.
- You can change Smart Sending settings in Message Settings. You can customize both the number of text messages and their frequency before Smart Sending skips subscribers.
- Transactional messages ignore Smart Sending.