Best practices to build a campaign-worthy audience

Building an audience is nothing new for most marketers. But building them for ongoing campaigns that address specific situations can take some getting used to.

Here are our best practices for creating successful campaign audiences in Copilot.cx.

Design your audiences around event triggers

In Copilot.cx, an in-app message is a popup that shows to users when they're using the app.

Since Copilot.cx is an event-based system, you should look at in-app audiences as "users who will get this message next time they open the app", rather than "users who will get this message now".

Learn more about how to create an in-app for first-time users here.

Find the right moment for your message

You should always try to send your campaigns at the best possible moment for conversion.

Here’s a great example from one of our clients to show how your campaigns can be optimized for maximum performance:

• Original – a message to all new users to buy replenishment products
• First optimization – change the time setting to send after a certain amount of replenishable usage
• Second optimization – find the precise time to send based on when the user needs a replenishment product

Have a closed timeframe and a clear set of rules

When setting up time-based campaigns, it's important to set an upper limit as well as an initial entrance point for the audience.

Here are a few examples:

• When targeting users who were first seen at least 3 days ago, they should also be first seen within 14 days.
• When looking for users who did not trigger a feature event in the last 12 hours, they should also not have triggered the event in the last 7 days.

The key here is to target users who recently matched your criteria. This is to avoid sending campaigns to the wrong people at the wrong time, or having a user who checks all the boxes on all your campaigns.

Once you've set your upper limit, have a think about edge cases too by asking questions like:

• Do you want to send an email to all users who didn't use a feature, including churned users?
• Do you want to show an in-app message to every user who triggered a specific event, including brand new users who are using it for the first time?

The answer to both of these should be no. So make sure all the checkboxes are marked to only include those who will benefit from the communication.

Look at things from the campaign's perspective

When you create an event-based ongoing campaign, you’ll usually be looking back from the moment the user should arrive into the audience. In these cases, the best perspective is from the campaign that should be triggered or sent at that time.

For example: “If I were the email, I would want to be sent 4 days after a user joined to give them time to try it out for themselves”.