Getting Started with Your Audience

The key to great marketing is to keep up with your contacts. When you have access to information that tells you who visited your online store, or who subscribed to your marketing content, it’s easier to know who to engage with. Mailchimp offers powerful and flexible tools that help you manage this data and use it to create targeted campaigns.

We'll cover the basics about your audience in this article, including what you need to know before you import contacts into Mailchimp.

Things to consider

How you build and manage your audience affects the ways you can use Mailchimp. With the right data, you can group contacts based on a variety of factors, then send content to just those groups. Take a moment to think about your marketing goals, who your contacts are, and what information they want to receive from you.

For example:

• Do you have seasonal customers, sales shoppers, or customers who are only interested in certain types of products, services, or events?
• Do you want to send different content to donors, sponsors, members, or other patrons?
• Does it matter if your contacts are local, domestic, or international?
• Do you sell products or services online, and ask customers to sign up for email marketing in the checkout process?
• Are there other factors that affect your audience?

Types of contacts

Use your Mailchimp audience to collect and manage subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts in one place.

Here are the definitions for each.

• Subscribed contact
  Someone who's opted in to receive your marketing emails or text messages.
• Unsubscribed contact
  Someone who ‌opted in to receive your marketing emails or text messages, but later opted out.
• Non-subscribed contact
  Someone who's interacted with your online store, but hasn't opted in to receive your marketing emails or text messages.

Create an audience

When you create a Mailchimp account, we’ll create an audience for you with the details you provide. We’ll also help you follow anti-spam practices for your emails and text messages. We recommend you maintain 1 primary audience in Mailchimp, and use tags, groups, or segments to organize and target your contacts.

You can add subscribed contacts one at a time, upload contacts from a file, copy and paste from a spreadsheet, or sync from other apps. We won't allow you to send emails or text messages to purchased, rented, or third-party lists, so be sure to check our audience requirements before you begin.

Here are some links to help you add contacts.

• Add a Single Subscriber to an Audience
• Import Contacts to Mailchimp
• Sync with other apps like WooCommerce, Magento, or BigCommerce

Your audience is your collection of contacts, so you should only need 1 audience. If you still choose to create another audience, be aware that audiences don’t share contact data. For example, if freddie@address.com is in 2 of your audiences, we count that as 2 contacts.

Build signup forms

Each Mailchimp audience comes with a signup form that you can share across your online channels. Use the signup form options in your Mailchimp account to gather contact information from members of your audience.

Customers with manager permissions and higher can create interest groups for your signup form and audience. Interest groups can be assigned by you or selected by your contacts, and can be visible or hidden on your forms.

Your audience will grow and change as people sign up, unsubscribe, and update their profiles. We recommend keeping an update your preferences link in your emails to encourage contacts to update their own information and interests.

Segment your audience

Use segments to group contacts with shared data. To create a segment, use conditions to filter contacts in your audience. You can create segments with almost any condition, like signup form data, tags, group preferences, email interactions, and location, to name a few.

If you sync an e-commerce platform to your Mailchimp account, you'll also be able to use purchase activity to add segments.

For Free and Essential plans, the segmenting tool supports up to 5 conditions, and you can save any segment for future use. Mailchimp accounts on a Standard plan or higher have a segmenting tool that supports unlimited conditions and nested logic.To learn more, check out how to Create and Send to a Segment.

Learn about your audience

When you track the makeup and behavior of your audience, it helps you better understand what your contacts want and don't want. You’ll find valuable insights on both your Audience’s marketing dashboard and Stats pages.

Audience dashboard

Your audience dashboard contains clickable data to help you learn more about your contacts and how to engage with them. You'll see recent growth trends, top tags, top locations, and how often contacts open and click your emails. To learn more, check out our About the Audience Dashboard article.

Stats

The Stats overview gives you details about your email marketing engagement. View open and click rates, see the change in subscribed contacts, or compare the performance of your last 30 emails.