How To Set Up A New Audience In Mailchimp

One Audition or Several? How to Organize Your Contacts to Optimize Your Marketing

6 benefits of maintaining a unmarried audience, and when to create more than

The fashion you organize your contacts can make the divergence betwixt targeted, personalized marketing and a ane-size-fits-all approach.

So how and when should yous create new audiences in Mailchimp? It's one of the nearly common questions we hear from customers, forth with the misconception that separate audiences should be created for contacts based on shared characteristics like where they're located or what types of products they're interested in.

In reality, your Mailchimp audience should exist extensive: it'due south where you continue everything you know about everyone you know, so yous can become a holistic understanding of the people who proceed your business growing. Maintaining a single audience still allows you to transport targeted messages to contacts with shared characteristics—in fact, it makes it easier. Read on to learn all the benefits of a one-audience approach (and a few exceptions to the rule).

Your Mailchimp audience is where you lot go along everything you know near everyone you know, so you can go a holistic understanding of the people who go on your business organization growing.

6 key benefits of a single audience

Having all your data in one identify within Mailchimp creates a single source of truth for insights well-nigh your people, making it much easier to get an understanding of who your audience is equally a whole.

This holistic view is important for your marketing for several key reasons:

It helps y'all get a better agreement of your people. Particularly if your business is just starting out, having i audience helps y'all come across a clearer picture of who you lot're talking to, and who you should exist talking to (it may not exist what yous'd expect). But seeing trends across your entire audience is helpful for businesses at any phase of growth.
Targeting is more effective with all your contact data in 1 identify. A unmarried audience makes it easier to use tools similar tags and segments to organize insights near subsets of contacts while still keeping an center on your audience every bit a whole, and lets you use pre-built segments with confidence, knowing yous're reaching everyone who meets a particular criteria.
A single audition simplifies sending. Not only does maintaining i audition make sending to tags and segments more than effective, it also makes it a lot easier if you do want to send a bulletin to your entire audience. Rather than replicating content across siloed audiences, just select everyone you want to send to—all in ane send.
You can keep tabs on trends—and quickly accept action. But considering your business organization is growing doesn't mean you need to create new audiences. Continuing to add together contacts to your existing audience tin help you spot irresolute patterns in your data at a glance—and detect new means to talk to people as your audience evolves.
It helps preserve data. When you take a primal location to look for details near your people, data is unlikely to get siloed or overlooked—or lost in the shuffle of moving information from 1 audition into some other (and this is particularly important if you're using GDPR forms to collect consent).
It makes it easier to maintain your contact information as you grow. With one view of your contacts and i consummate record of their engagement history, information technology's easier to decide if it's time to re-engage or annal contacts.

Just considering your business is growing doesn't mean you demand to create new audiences. Adding to your existing audition tin assistance you find new ways to talk to people every bit your audience evolves.

When to create a second (or third) audience

While growth in itself isn't a good reason to create boosted audiences, some businesses may notice trends equally they abound that practice justify a need to create more than than 1 audience in Mailchimp. The virtually tell-tale sign is when you lot start to see distinctly different subsets of people you demand to communicate with, with no crossover in contacts or messages y'all'd want to send to both.

Here are a couple of examples where separate audiences may exist the best selection for your business organization:

If you have a B2B and B2C side to your concern. If you lot marketplace to both vendors and buyers—or 2 distinctly different types of customers—through Mailchimp, it may exist all-time to keep these audiences dissever. This is particularly true if you know you lot'll want to dig into reporting to understand trends and performance separately for these audiences (and not just the campaigns you send to them) over time.
If y'all communicate to both internal and external audiences. For businesses that talk to both employees and customers through Mailchimp, keeping these audiences split up may exist useful to keep operation information cleaner—and make sure y'all never accidentally send a bulletin with sensitive information to an external audience.

In cases like the ones described to a higher place, where you'll never want to talk to distinctly different audiences in the same way (or where crossover in messages may really be a liability), maintaining split up audiences can help yous go on content, reporting, and insights separate across these 2 (or more than) subsets of people. But in many cases, using tools like tags and segments to target inside one audience is the best—and easiest—selection.

Fewer audiences, more targeting

Every bit a general dominion, before you create a new audience it's a proficient idea to stop and ask yourself if organizational tools like tags or segments could get the task done (and yet let you maintain a single view of your audition).

Here are a few examples where targeting within a unmarried audience is far more constructive than creating new audiences:

Instead of creating a new audience for contacts you lot met at an event, use a tag to note where yous met them when you upload the list of new contacts into your existing audience. You can even set up an automation to trigger based on that tag, so you can easily follow upwards with these contacts in a personalized way—without separating them from the rest of your audience.
Instead of creating dissever audiences for contacts located in different cities, keep all of these contacts in one audience and use the pre-built segments on your audition dashboard to attain out to contacts based on their location—simply click and go.
Instead of creating a new audience for all contacts that share a particular interest, use tags to note anything you need to about your contacts' preferences. Common tags across your contacts can also be seen in your audition dashboard, so you can target these tags with campaigns in merely a few clicks.
Instead of creating a split up audition for new contacts to welcome them or share onboarding information, use segments to target messaging based on signup appointment, while even so keeping new contacts in the same audience as the rest of your customers. Bonus: with the audience dashboard, you can quickly accomplish segments of new contacts based on their sign-up source, then you lot can get fifty-fifty more targeted with your messages.

In curt, keeping contact data as consolidated equally possible makes it simpler to get a holistic view of your audition, makes it easier to utilize flexible tools like tags and segments to target messages based on insights, and ultimately sets you upwardly for smarter growth.