Filtering Your Contacts For Your Campaign Audience

Filtering your audience enables you to better target your subscribers using specific conditions that capture how they’ve interacted with your business through Podium. 

These filters help your campaigns reach the right people with the right message. You’ll be able to tailor your content to fit the right audience and vice versa–tailor your audience to fit your message. Tailoring your audience in such a way makes your marketing content relevant and personalized in the eyes of your subscribers. These practices help reduce your unsubscribe rate and increase your engagement rates (i.e. click rate, response rate). 

For a full list of the filters available in Campaigns and what data they track, check out this reference page. 

To filter your audience when creating a campaign, follow these steps:

1. Click Get started on the audience section of the campaign form. (If you’ve already edited your audience, the button will instead say Edit.)
2. From here, you can select a pre-built segment from the list in the center or create a custom audience by clicking Create audience.
3. When the custom audience window opens, you can select filter categories by clicking Add filter. You’ll see a category list that includes, Campaigns, Locations, Opt-In Methods, Payments, Reviews, Tags, and Webchat. For this example, Campaigns is selected. (Check out the filter reference page to learn more about what each category contains.)
4. The Campaigns filter is automatically added to the audience window. From left to right, you can edit the filter based on campaign activity, campaign(s) targetted, and time frame. To edit each section, select items from the dropdown. For this example, the filter is edited to say “Has clicked a link in / Weekend Sale / Anytime.” The number of subscribers this reaches appears in the bottom left corner.*
   1. Note: For a filter that has a multi-select option with all options defaulted checked, you can do a quick single-select by hovering over the option you want and clicking Only. That will deselect all the other options except the single select you chose.
5. To layer filters on top of each other, click Add filter below the existing filters. Again, you’ll be asked to select a filter category. For this example, Reviews is selected.
   1. Again, you can edit the filter to get more specific. For this example, this filter will specify any subscribers who have left a review on any site of 4 or 5 stars.
   2. Note: The filters will layer additively, meaning in this example, the audience will target those who clicked a link in your campaigns AND submitted a review on Google of 4 or 5 stars. Thus, a subscriber needs to meet both criteria in order to be included in this audience.
6. To remove a filter, hover over it and click the X at the end of line.
7. When you’re finished adding filters, click Next. You’ll then see a window asking if you want to skip certain subscribers who fall into two conditions: 1.) Those who’ve received a campaign from your business in the last 5 days, and 2.) those who’ve had an open conversation with your business in the past 24 hours. This window appears to encourage to follow SMS Marketing best practices. To override these suggestions, uncheck either or both of the conditions.
   1. When you click Continue, you’ll be brought to the main review page of the contact form. If there aren’t any errors with your audience, you’ll see a green check mark with the total number of subscribers in your audience.
8. If you want to edit the filter, click Edit on the audience section and select the Custom Audience section that’s highlighted in blue at the top of the audience page.

*You can see how many subscribers meet the filter criteria by referencing the number in the bottom left corner of the window. That number will dynamically update as you add, edit, and remove filters. That number does not take into account the send optimization suggestions that enable you to skip people who have received a campaign in the last 5 days and who have an active conversation in the Inbox.