Audience Building

Selecting Your Audience in Email Studio

Marketing Cloud allows for modular audience building by giving us the ability to combine multiple campaigns and reports into a single email "list." The de-duplication function within the builder also ensures that we won't send multiple emails to the same contact, regardless of how many times they appear on any one of your reports or campaigns.

Note:
Do not start building your audience until you are completely ready to send your email; you cannot configure your audience ahead of time.

If you exit out of the audience-building window at any point, all of your choices and changes will be lost.

On the left side of the builder window, you can see folders containing data files of varying types that we can use to create our lists. The three most commonly used data types are:

  • Salesforce Campaigns: These are campaigns that you can create in PACE. Once created, you can search for them in this folder.
  • Salesforce Reports: Similarly, this is where reports created in PACE are stored.
  • Data Extensions: These are data files that are separate from PACE and need to be uploaded directly to Marketing Cloud. Since this data does not natively sync back to our PACE database, we usually do not recommend using data extensions except for special cases where you need a custom field referenced in your email.

To create your target list, click and drag your desired data file into the Targeted box. Similarly, to build your exclusion list, click and drag your desired data files to the Excluded and Suppressed box.

A few notes about Exclusions and Suppressions:

If you are sending an email to a list that is using Campaigns or Reports, 99.99% of the time, you will need to include our "master" suppression reports in your Excluded and Suppressed box.

These reports can be found in PACE and are named:

Email: Standard Exclusions Final

Exclusion Contacts no Special Handling

NOTES:

  • Some teams (e.g., Alumni, BCH) have special versions of these exclusion reports. 
  • Depending on the type of your email, you will need to click and drag one (or both) option(s) into the Excluded and Suppressed box.
  • You can still use any custom exclusion/suppression lists you have built for your email in addition to these master files. 
  • Contact a Marketing Cloud admin if you are unsure which exclusion(s) apply to your email.

Creating a campaign from several reports

  1. Create a new campaign in PACE with your preferred name.

  2. Find a report that best suits your needs in the Reports > All Folders section.

  3. Click the Edit button on your chosen report.

  4. Run the report, and close it.

  5. Click the down arrow next to the edit button and then click Add to Campaign.

  6. Search for your campaign, then click Submit.

  7. Repeat with other reports to merge several reports into one campaign.