Best practices for creating an audience

The following best practices should help you create audiences that capture the customers you need.

Funnel customer behavior groups

When using more than one behavior group within the customer behavior filter, make sure you add your behaviors with the widest reach, then getting more granular with each additional behavior. Treating the customer behaviors setup like a funnel will ensure you aren't leaving a customer segment out.

You can do this by adding all your customer behavior criteria that use the did condition first before adding customer behavior that uses did not.

For example, you could create an audience who did add a product to their cart between one to two hours ago and then did not remove the product from their cart in the last two hours.

Stagger the qualification window when using abandoned campaigns

When creating audiences for abandoned cart, product, and search campaigns, add a staggered qualification window to capture more behavioral events and take advantage of additional retries.

For example, since cart abandonment is the highest priority event, you could add a qualification window of three hours. As the second highest priority event, product abandonment would use a qualification window of four hours, and lastly search abandonment would use a qualification window of five hours.

Product views must be for the same product

When capturing view product customer behaviors, keep in mind that view product only considers views for the same product, not views across multiple different products.

For example, the audience captures customers who have viewed a product more than five times in the last seven days.

Customer A views the same product seven times in three days and qualifies for the audience.

Customer B views 10 different products in two days and does not qualify because the products are all different.

Use catch up campaigns

Some customers may not qualify for a campaign because of the channel frequency cap.

To include more customers, you can duplicate your audience and add a did not receive email customer behavior and select one or more campaigns.

Understand your inventory levels

If you are defining a product-based customer behavior (ex. add product(s) to cart) by inventory size, make sure the inventory size makes sense for your business.

For example, if you are a boutique or do small, limited edition inventory updates, you may not want to limit the behavior by inventory size.

The first product-carrying or search-carrying group is your product foundation

The first time that you define a customer’s product or search interaction in an AND condition within an audience sets the product foundation. Once your foundation is set, you can only remove products from your base and you can’t add more, unless you add OR conditions.

These foundations are called either product-carrying or search-carrying, depending on whether they use product actions (add to cart, viewed product, etc.), or searches for products, respectively.

Both foundations must be the first one of their kind in the Customer Behaviors list,must use the positive did condition (such as did view product instead of did not view product).

You can add additional product groups as long as they reference your foundation (such as using above products instead of any products), and use a positive conditional (like did add products to cart instead of did not add products to cart).

For example, let's say you want to create an audience that added products to cart in the last three hours, added those products to a wishlist, viewed any products four to five hours ago, and did not make a purchase in the last 30 days. The following list breaks out the groups and how they work together:

• Did add any product(s) to cart in the last three hours
  • This is the product-carrying group.
  • Your foundation contains all products that a customer added to their cart in the last three hours.
  • Did add above product(s) to wishlist
    • This group is not first in the list and it references the product-carrying group by using above products.
    • This removes all products from your foundation that were not both added to cart within the last three hours and added to a wishlist.
  • Viewed any product(s) between four and five hours ago
    • This group uses any product but it is not first in the list, so it does not remove products from your foundation.
    • This group filters the qualifying customers in the audience and removes users who didn’t view products between four to five hours ago.
  • Did not purchase product(s) in the last 30 days
    • The group does not remove products from your foundation because it uses did not.
    • This group filters the qualifying customers in the audiences and removes users who did not make a purchase in the last 30 days.

Target partial or whole phone numbers

Target specific phone numbers, such as +1-123-456-7891 or parts of phone numbers, such as +1-212 in phone number Audience Builder.

Within phone number Audience Builder:

1. Click Customer Attributes.
2. Click +Attribute Group.
3. Select Phone Number [ID].
4. Enter either a whole phone number or part of a phone number to filter for in your audience.

Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)

In September, 2021, Apple released new privacy and consumer preference controls with iOS 15, MacOS Monterey, and watch OS 8 that added Mail Privacy Protection (MPP).

Bluecore recommends building an engaged subscriber segment that isn’t exclusively based on open data. Instead of filtering by opens, we recommend combining conditions with clicks, purchase data etc.

Identify all MPP opens

Identify MPP opens by looking at customers who:

1. Did open email in the last ‘x’ days where Apple Privacy Open = True

How to Identify MPP Opens Who Clicked on Emails

A small portion of MPP opens could also consist of emails opened by an actual recipient (which we can’t differentiate), in such cases additionally filtering by clicks is recommended.

Identify MPP openers who clicked on emails by looking at customers who:

1. Did open email in the last ‘x’ days where Apple Privacy Open = True
2. Did click on an email in the last ‘x’ days

How to Identify Non-MPP opens (human opens)

Identify non-MPP opens by looking at customers who:

1. Did open email in the last X days
2. Where Apple Privacy Open = False

The above filter can be applied to create audiences for identifying:

1. Openers (with your preferred time frame)

How to Identify Non-MPP Opens Who Are Non-Purchasers

Identify openers who are non-purchasers:

1. Did open email in the last ‘x’ days where Apple Privacy Open = False
2. Did not purchase any product at least once in the last ‘X’ days

Add all eligibility statuses

To include all email and SMS/MMS eligibility statuses in your audience, you can remove the channel eligibility section.