Audiences

An audience is a named list of contacts, such as “Newsletter” or “Product updates”. You choose one or more audiences as the recipients of a campaign, and you can add people to an audience by hand, from an import, through the API or with a hosted sign-up URL.

How audiences work

Each person on an audience is a subscriber: a link between one contact and the audience, with its own Subscribed flag. The same contact can be on several audiences and be subscribed to some and unsubscribed from others.

• Campaigns send to subscribers whose Subscribed flag is on, whose contact isn’t globally unsubscribed and whose address isn’t suppressed. A contact on several selected audiences gets one copy.
• Unsubscribing turns the flag off but keeps the subscriber on the list, so you keep the history. See Unsubscribes.
• Deleting a subscriber removes the person from the list. The contact stays in your workspace.

The Audiences list

Go to Email Marketing›Audiences to see your audiences with their Name, Subscribers and Created date. The Subscribers column shows how many subscribers each audience has against your plan’s limit, for example 1.2k/10k. Use the row menu to Manage subscribers, Rename or Delete an audience.

To create one, select Create audience, enter a Name and select Create. Names must be unique in the workspace.

The audience page

Open an audience to manage its subscribers. The header shows the subscriber count and the limit badge, with these actions:

Below it, the subscribers table lists Email, First name, Last name, Subscribed and Created, with search, filters and a row menu to Edit or Delete each subscriber. See Manage subscribers.

Limits

Each plan limits how many subscribers one audience can hold. The number of audiences isn’t limited.

The limit counts every subscriber on the audience, including people who unsubscribed. To make room, delete subscribers you no longer need, upgrade your plan or request a higher limit with Request Increase on the Sending Limits card of the dashboard home page.

When an audience is full, Add subscriber is disabled and every way of adding people, including the API, imports and the subscribe URL, is rejected with 422 and a message such as “Pro includes 50,000 subscribers per audience.”. The API error includes the current usage:

{
  "error": "Pro includes 50,000 subscribers per audience.",
  "usage": { "used": 50000, "limit": 50000, "plan": "pro" }
}

Use the API

The Audiences API lets you create, retrieve, rename, list and delete audiences, and the Subscribers API manages the people on them. You can use an audience’s name instead of its aud_ ID in the URL. The API needs an API key with Full Access.

curl https://api.emailit.com/v2/audiences \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $EMAILIT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "name": "Newsletter" }'

Audience responses include subscribers_count and a usage object with used, limit and plan. Creating, retrieving and updating an audience also returns its token, the secret part of its subscribe URL. A duplicate name returns 409.

Events

Audience and subscriber changes produce events that you can receive with webhooks and that start automations:

Imports and the subscribe URL don’t send subscriber events.

Next steps