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Creating New Audiences

Audiences are dynamic customer segments that convert millions of interactions and transactions into actionable intelligence, so your team can target, personalize, and measure engagement at scale.

Updated over 3 weeks ago

Prerequisites:

Before getting started, ensure you have:

Required Permissions:

Audiences are available to users with the following permissions:

  • Analyst

  • Marketing

  • Marketing Analyst

  • Operator

  • Owner

Audience limits by plan

All plans include 10 pre-made audiences. In addition, each plan supports the following number of custom audiences:

  • Starter: up to 10

  • Pro: up to 500

  • Enterprise: up to 1,500

How to Create an Audience

  1. Navigate to Customers > Audiences

  2. Click Create Audience

  3. Fill the information
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    1. Choose an Audience Name that is easily searchable. This is for internal purposes only.

    2. See Audience Traits for information about what data you can use to create the audience you want. Also see Audience Examples for some common options.

    3. The Audience Status will be set to ON by default, this will allow it to start pulling personas into this audience.

    4. See other optional audience settings below for more information.
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  4. Review the forecasted audience size by clicking the Forecast button.

    1. If you add additional traits, you'll need to refresh the forecaster.

    2. Click on Spot Check for the following:

    3. Random Sampling: This will show you a randomized list of personas that are in the audience. Clicking the refresh button will generate a new, randomized list.

    4. Spot Checker: This tab will allow you to check whether specific personas are within the audience. You will only be able to use their email or phone number. When using either, they must be an exact match.

      1. For phone numbers: Do not include parentheses, dashes, or spaces.
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  5. Save

Advanced Settings (optional)

Include anonymous users

Anonymous users do not have a name, email, phone or other personally identifiable trait. Destinations that do not allow anonymous users will not be sent them.
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Modify points for contacts in this audience

Give the audience you create additional points for meeting the criteria you set after building the audience.

Points modifiers

Description

Example

Multiplier

Whatever number you input in this field will multiply the number of points a customer in this audience will accrue.

Set up a Double Points Day by adding a "2" here

Boost points

Give customers that fall into this audience a specific number of points

Give customers an additional 500 points for spending X amount in a given month

If you want to save this audience as a draft, set the Audience status to OFF until you're ready to turn it on. This will help avoid accidentally giving customers points before you're ready.

Points Modifier Advanced Settings

  • Be sure to set a Start Time and End Time to restrict the points modifier to a specific time frame

  • If you want this to only be available at certain times on certain days, use the Restrict to happy hours section

  • Optional Restrictions: You can limit multipliers that occur with purchases that use these particular attributes, keep in mind that only 1 value can be used per field except for Store IDs and Payment Methods.

    • Brand: Brand name of the actual Product

    • SKU: The unique identifier that is used for your inventory

    • Category: Flower, Topical, etc.

    • Payment Method: Cash, Debit, Credit Card, etc.

  • You can boost or reward customers who pay with any of the specified payment methods, regardless of which payment method they used at the POS.

  • Store IDs: Limited to the location(s) that the purchase was made at

You will have to verify values that are coming through the POS to use these restrictions to work with your particular setup. It is recommended to analyze an audience and check the Order Insights tab to see what is available.
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Filter data sources this audience should ingest records from

Select a specific Data Source if your goal is to create an audience from only a particular integration.
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Automatically send audience members to a data destination integration

Select a specific Data Destination if your goal is to push an audience to one of your connected systems (like pushing an audience as a list to a third-party email provider).

Advanced Settings & Members who can use this audience

Restrict usage of the audience by team member. Select a user from the dropdown under "whitelisted users" to allow them access to the audience.
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Audience Badge

If a user is in a badged audience, we will show this badge within the staff view, native apps, web wallets, and in AIQ ecommerce. The user will lose this badge when they leave this audience.

  1. Open the Audiences page and either edit an existing audience or create a new one.
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  2. Under Awarded Badge, click Select badge and upload the image you want to use as the badge
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  3. Save

How to Duplicate an Audience

Duplicating an audience to useful if you're building off an existing audience and don't want to start from scratch.

  1. Navigate to Customers > Audiences

  2. Click the More menu [...] in the table row of the specified audience.

  3. Click the documents icon to duplicate an audience

  4. This will open the audience builder with "Copy of {{audience name}}". You can rename it to whatever you'd like and continue with other settings from there.

How to Create an Audience Group

  1. Navigate to Customers > Audiences

  2. Click Create Group
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  3. Name the Group
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  4. Select the audiences you want in the group using the plus (+) button
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  5. Click Save

How to Export and Analyze an Audience

  1. Navigate to Customers > Audiences
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  2. Click the More menu [...] in the table row of the specified audience. There are several options for getting data about an audience:

    1. Beaker: Gives you all the insight our Data Analytics provides for this specific audience

    2. Download: Export a full detailed CSV list including contact information and points balances

    3. Star: Export a points report, per persona or per store.

    4. Barcode: Export a transactional report of sales made by contacts in this audience, by date range

    5. Network: Provides a way to export a referral report by personas in this audience.

Note: may not be available for all accounts, please use the Chat widget in the bottom right of your AIQ dashboard, and select the "Request Report" option that appears when you start a new conversation if it is not available to you.

AIQ Audience Glossary

  • Modifiers: If you have a points modifier like 2x points enabled, an icon will appear in this column

    • Rocket = Points Multiplier

    • Line up graph = Positive Points Boost

    • Line down graph = Negative Points Boost

  • Audience Size: total number of contacts in AIQ that meet the audience's criteria

  • Loyalty Members: the total number of loyalty members currently in the audience, since it was last sized

  • Opt Ins (per channel): total number of contacts in AIQ that meet the audience's criteria and are opted in to that channel

  • CLTV: Customer Lifetime Value of the audience

    • Calculation is AOV * purchase frequency * 3

    • IF you want a per-year value, divide this number by 3

  • Last Sized: Date and time the audience was most recently sized and updated to add new personas and remove personas who no longer meet the audience criteria

Audiences Troubleshooting

Why Are Categories Missing from “Most Commonly Bought Category” in Audiences?

This is likely due to incomplete or incorrect category mapping from your POS system. If these categories aren’t mapped correctly, they won’t appear as options within AIQ.

To verify what category data AIQ is receiving:

  1. Navigate to the Analytics tab (available for accounts with an Analytics package).
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  2. Review Orders by Category to see a full list of categories synced from your POS.
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  3. Use this report to confirm which categories are available for use in the Audience Builder.

Why does my audience show a count of 0 (I expect it to have data), and how can I fix this?

The reason depends on where you’re seeing the zero value:
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1. Audience Preview Shows “0”
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If your audience list preview shows “0,” this simply means the audience is still segmenting.

  • Audience segmentation typically takes about 10-30 minutes, depending on the traits and filters used. Once segmentation completes, the audience count will update automatically.

2. Audience Forecast Shows “0”
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If you see “0” in the Forecast section while editing your audience:

  • Double-check your traits and logic (AND/OR statements) to ensure they’re correctly defined.

  • Verify that your data sources (e.g., loyalty, contact traits, purchase history) include matching personas.

Audiences FAQs

Can you set points multipliers with decimals like 2.5x?

Yes! The points multiplier feature supports decimal amounts.

If someone enters an audience with a points multiplier that's already on, does the multiplier apply to all their previous transactions?

No. They'll only receive the points multiplier for purchases made after they enter that audience.

If a persona is in two separate audiences which have point multipliers, will they fall into both of them?

No. If a customer is in two audiences with points multipliers, they'll only receive the higher of the two multipliers.

Do audiences automatically archive after a certain amount of time?

No, we do not auto-archive any audiences.

Do archived audiences count towards my plan limit?

No.

How do I create a custom attribute / trait?

See Custom Traits.

How do I create a test audience?

  1. Navigate to Customers > Audiences and Create new

  2. For an email test audience, use the Contact Trait / Email List trait

  3. For an SMS test audience, use the Contact Trait / Phone List trait

  4. Create the test campaign, select one of the audiences from above, and publish to send a test campaign to specific contacts

Sending test SMS campaigns may result in carrier blocking/filtration due to multiple receipts of "test campaigns" potentially being marked as spam and in turn, blocked. You can always use the preview link to see what an SMS campaign will look like in lieu of sending an actual SMS test campaign.
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How do I download a list of all my customers?

Option 1. Use the existing "Financial Reporting" audience (not available for all accounts)

  1. Navigate to Customers > Audiences

  2. Search for the "Financial Reporting" audience

  3. Download using the (...) in the audiences table

  4. If the download option is not available request a download via the "Request Report" from the options when starting a new conversation in our chat widget.

Option 2: Create an audience of all customers & request report

  1. Navigate to Customers > Audiences
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  2. Click Create new audience
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  3. Add a name
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  4. Do not add any traits and click "Forecast"
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  5. Save the audience
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  6. Request a download via the "Request Report" from the options when starting a new conversation in our chat widget.

What if I have 2 ecommerce sources for online orders, can I differentiate between the 2 in my audiences?

Yes, you can create an audience "Performed event/Payment method ---> contains ---> "ecomName1" or "ecomName2" (replace with the name of you ecommerce provider).
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How long does a created audience take to be available / load?

Typically about 10-30 minutes.
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How Do I Upload an Audience?

See Bulk Import Personas, and once you've imported personas, an audience is automatically generated for those customers.
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What time frame is the audience trait "Likely to return soon" considering to be "soon"?

The trait "Likely to return soon" means a customer is expected to return in next 6 days to be considered "Soon".
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Academy Course: Persona Management & Audience Segmentation

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