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Understanding Audiences

This section discusses:

An audience is a specific group of people to whom you target a marketing campaign. Use PeopleSoft Marketing to create and manage audiences for all marketing campaigns including online marketing.

Every marketing campaign requires one or more target audiences. These target audiences can be current customers drawn from your own database, unknown prospects from a rented list, or respondents to a banner ad on a website. However, before you can specify a target audience for a campaign, you must first define the audience.

An audience can serve multiple purposes in a marketing campaign. First and foremost, an audience is the list of contacts that you want to reach with your campaign. However, that primary audience can be segmented into smaller groups that enable you to test the effectiveness of different campaign strategies. You can also export your audience to a third-party vendor who will append data not normally gathered by your company.

Before you define an audience, consider the following questions:

  • Are the intended recipients all known to you?

    That is, are the intended recipients already in your PeopleSoft CRM database (an internal audience), or are they unknown to you and will they be contacted by an outside vendor (an external audience)?

  • How will you contact the recipients?

    For example, do you plan to contact them using PeopleSoft Online Marketing, or Sales applications, or will you use a third-party direct-mail vendor?

  • Do you want the audience to reflect changes to the database each time that you generate the audience (a dynamic audience), or will the audience remain the same (a fixed audience)?

  • Will you use the audience to test your campaign before you take it live or will you try different strategies (a test audience)?

Considering these questions in advance will help you define your audience.

Note: Because you can use audiences with multiple campaigns, you should carefully consider changes to an existing audience so that you don't adversely affect another campaign. For this reason, PeopleSoft Marketing enables you to clone audiences.

A segment is a group of customers defined by some selection criteria. Segments are considered a type of audience—you define their selection as you do audiences, and you can use them interchangeably with dynamic audiences in PeopleSoft Marketing, Online Marketing, and the enterprise.

You can arrange segments hierarchically by defining parent-child relationships between segments. Each segment can have multiple children, but only one parent. Child segments always inherit the selection criteria of their parent segment, and by default they also inherit the parent's owner attributes.

Segments and segment hierarchies are associated with segment groups, which is simply a way to arrange the segments and hierarchies. Child segments are always associated with the same segment group as their parents.

Audiences and segments pass through structured life cycles. Each stage of the life cycle is called a status. Status changes must follow predefined status rules that are delivered with your system.

Note: Audience status rules are not the same as campaign and activity status rules. You cannot redefine audience status rules on the Status Rules page.

An audience can pass through the following statuses:

Audience Status

Description

In Design

Audience is new and selection criteria is not yet defined.

Designed

At least some audience selection criteria are defined.

Scheduled

Audience is scheduled to be generated at a definite future date and time.

Processing

Audience generation is currently in process.

Generated

Audience generation process finished successfully.

Approved

Audience is approved for use in live campaigns.

Committed

Audience is in use by one or more campaign activities and cannot be modified except to add correspondence management requests or to manually change the status of the audience to Archived.

Archived

Audience is inactivated and cannot be newly associated with any campaign. Audience status can be changed only to Archived when the audience is not in use by a live campaign or by an online dialog.

PeopleSoft Marketing audiences are defined most broadly as either internal (known) or external (unknown). You generate Internal audiences by selecting records from your PeopleSoft CRM database. These records may be existing customers, or a list imported from an outside source. In either case, the audience is drawn from the database.

External audiences are drawn from an external source such as a mailing list produced by a third party vendor that you import into your system. Another example would be a group of respondents to a weblink promo, such as a website banner ad. While it is possible that certain individuals drawn from these external sources may happen to exist already in your own database, an external audience is originally defined and drawn from an external source rather than directly and exclusively from individual records in your own database

The audience source describes whether the audience is external or internal and, if internal, how it was created.

The following table lists and describes the nine sources of audiences:

Audience Source

Description

External using Online Marketing

An External using Online Marketing audience is made up of contacts previously unknown (in most cases) to your PeopleSoft Marketing system. For example, placing a banner ad on a website exposes your offer to an audience, but you have no idea who will see it and respond.

External audiences are intended to be used in conjunction with Online Marketing dialog popup web pages where the audience is unknown.

Internal Using Audience Builder

The audience is generated from contacts currently in the PeopleSoft Marketing database. Audience Builder enables users who do not know SQL to define a simplified selection query.

Internal Using Combine Audiences

Two or more existing audiences are combined into a new, larger audience. All existing audiences included in a combined audience definition must be drawn from contacts currently in the PeopleSoft Marketing system.

Internal Using Import

A contact list is imported into your PeopleSoft CRM database, from which you generate an internal (known) audience.

Internal Using PSQuery

This query uses PSQuery functionality to create an audience from contacts currently in the PeopleSoft Marketing system. Using PSQuery requires a knowledge of SQL.

Internal Using Saved Search

This search is based on the search criteria entered on a Configurable Search page. You must first enable audience creation using the Configurable Search page. An enabled search page enables you to save the search as an audience.

Note: This option doesn't appear when you are creating a new audience. You can view or update this audience type on the Audience Detail page, but you cannot create it.

Control Group

Control groups help you gauge the effectiveness of your campaign by isolating a small segment of your target audience. By comparing sales results of the larger audience to those of the control group, you can determine the actual influence of your campaign. How control group members are drawn from each included audience is controlled by a combination of the control group audience size and source audience percentages.

Note: This option doesn't appear when you are creating a new audience. You can view or update this audience type on the Audience Detail page, but you cannot create it.

Test Audience

You create a test audience by selecting a subset of a generated audience. Use test audiences to try different offers on different subsets of your audience. These test audiences can be created as a percentage of the original audience count, or users can specify the total number of records for each test audience. Test audience selection is random. All test audiences are fixed audiences.

Note: You can create test audiences only for audiences in the status of Generated, Approved, or Committed.

Segment

A segment is similar to an audience built using Audience Builder. You can create segments in a hierarchical structure in which a child segment automatically inherits the roles and selection criteria of its parent segment.

For more information, refer to the PeopleTools: Query documentation.

Audiences are one of two types, either Fixed or Dynamic.

A fixed audience is an internal audience that does not change, such as the list of people who attended a conference. A dynamic audience is an internal audience that may change over time. An example of a dynamic target audience is a newsletter campaign that periodically sends out customized email messages to subscribers, pointing them to specific web pages. As new subscribers sign on, you want the target audience to include those people.

Note: Segments are always dynamic.

The following table describes the audience types:

Audience Type

Description

Fixed

The audience query runs only at the time the audience is created—results are static after the audience is generated. New contacts meeting the audience criteria are not added to the list unless you manually regenerate the audience, or clone it and generate the cloned audience.

Audience members can be added manually to a fixed audience.

Dynamic

Audience query criteria is stored and run each time that an action associated with the audience runs. Each time that you use the audience, new contacts that meet the criteria are included in the results, and old contacts that no longer meet the criteria are omitted from the results.