Selecting Your Target Audience

Choose which lists and segments receive your campaign

Selecting Your Target Audience

Before sending a campaign, you need to define who will receive it. Mailnaptic lets you target one or more lists and segments, giving you flexible control over your audience.

Choosing Your Audience

1. In the campaign builder, navigate to the Audience step.
2. Under Target Audience, click the dropdown to browse your available lists and segments.
3. Select one or more lists and/or segments. You can mix lists and segments in the same campaign.
4. As you add audiences, the estimated recipient count updates to show the total number of contacts that will receive the campaign.

Lists vs. Segments

• Lists are static collections of contacts. A contact is either on a list or not. Use lists for broad audience groups (e.g., “Newsletter subscribers”, “Customers”).
• Segments are dynamic groups defined by rules. Membership is recalculated in real time. Use segments for targeted groups (e.g., “Opened in last 30 days”, “Tagged VIP”).

How Audience Merging Works

When you select multiple lists and segments, Mailnaptic merges them into a single recipient list. If a contact appears in more than one selected audience, they receive the email only once — Mailnaptic automatically de-duplicates recipients by email address.

Audience Considerations

• Only subscribed contacts receive campaign emails. Contacts with a status of unsubscribed, bounced, or suppressed are automatically excluded.
• Frequency caps — if your organization has frequency caps configured, some contacts may be excluded even if they match the target audience, to prevent over-mailing.
• Global suppression — contacts on the global suppression list are always excluded from all sends.

Tips

• For most campaigns, targeting a segment is preferable to targeting a raw list, because segments let you refine the audience with engagement and behavioral criteria.
• Always review the estimated recipient count before proceeding to the send step.
• Consider adding exclusion segments (see the “Excluding Segments” article) to further refine your audience.
• If you see a lower-than-expected recipient count, check that your contacts are subscribed and not on the global suppression list.