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Audiences: One Home for Every Segment

Audiences are campaign-ready segments. Nviti presents every segment in one Audiences directory, while each type uses the membership model that best fits its purpose.

What Is an Audience?

Nviti supports three Audience types:

  • Smart Audience — membership is calculated live from saved rules. Contacts enter and leave automatically as their profile, engagement, tags, groups, and commerce activity change.
  • Automated Audience — membership is explicit. WhatsApp workflows and authorized team members add or remove contacts.
  • Custom Audience — membership is manually curated or attached through CSV import. Custom Audiences use the existing contact-list storage internally, so existing data and imports continue to work.

Accessing Audiences

  1. Open your Workspace
  2. Go to Marketing in the sidebar
  3. Click Audiences

Creating an Audience

The Audiences directory offers a creation card for each type. Choose the type first, then provide its name, description, and configuration.

Audience type is fixed after creation so stored membership and rule behavior cannot change unexpectedly. Create a new Audience when you need a different membership strategy.

Audience Details

  • Name — A clear, descriptive name (e.g., "Instagram Leads - Last 30 Days")
  • Description — Optional notes about what this audience is for
  • Type — Smart, Automated, or Custom
  • Active — Toggle whether this audience is currently being used

Audience Tabs

  • Overview — identity, mode, status, and guidance.
  • Rules & Automation — configure Smart rules or learn how workflow-managed membership works.
  • Contacts — review matched contacts, broadcast readiness, opt-outs, missing phone numbers, and membership source.

Automated and Custom Audiences allow manual multi-add and bulk removal. Custom Audiences also support CSV import and export. Smart Audience contacts are read-only because their rules control membership.

Smart Audience Rules

Build one or more condition groups and choose AND or OR both within each group and between groups. This supports targeting logic such as:

(WhatsApp source AND VIP tag) OR (Lead score ≥ 80 AND Sales intent)

Conditions are added as needed; a new Smart Audience starts with one empty condition instead of a fixed list of slots. Rules can use:

  • Contact source, subscription, phone/email availability, and creation date
  • Recent channel interaction
  • Visitor tags and Custom Audience membership
  • Latest-conversation intent, emotion, lead score, channel, activity, context, recommendation, and conversation tags
  • Order count, lifetime spend, order status, and last order date
  • Active cart activity

Conversation metrics always come from the visitor's most recently active conversation, so combined metrics describe one coherent customer state. Active Smart Audiences require complete rules; deactivate an Audience first when you want to save it as a draft.

Workflow Membership

WhatsApp workflows provide Add to Audience and Remove from Audience actions. Only active Automated Audiences appear in these actions. Smart and Custom Audiences are intentionally excluded. Repeating an add is idempotent and does not duplicate or reset the original membership.

Custom Audience Imports

Custom Audiences accept CSV files containing phone_number, phone, or email. Nviti matches existing company contacts by normalized phone first and email second. Unmatched and ambiguous rows are reported, and imports never create contacts silently.

Managing Audiences

The Audience Table

Column Description
Name The audience's name
Description Brief description of the audience
Type Smart, Automated, or Custom
Contacts Stored count for Automated and Custom Audiences or Live for Smart Audiences
Active Whether the audience is active

Editing an Audience

Click Edit on any audience row to manage its overview, rules/automation, and contacts in tabs.

Deleting an Audience

Click Delete to remove an audience. This doesn't delete the visitors themselves — it just removes the segment definition.

Filtering

Use the directory tabs to show All, Smart, Automated, or Custom Audiences.

Use Cases

  • New Leads — Visitors who joined in the last 7 days
  • Engaged Customers — Visitors who have sent 3+ messages
  • Cart Abandoners — Visitors who added items to cart but didn't checkout
  • VIP Customers — Visitors with high order values or frequent purchases
  • Inactive Contacts — Visitors who haven't interacted in 30+ days

Using Audiences in Broadcasts

To send a broadcast to an audience:

  1. Create or edit a broadcast.
  2. In Audience, choose Selected audiences.
  3. Select one or more Smart, Automated, or Custom Audiences.
  4. Configure the WhatsApp Business account and message content.
  5. Test the broadcast before sending.

Audience types can be mixed in one broadcast. The broadcast form previews matched, ready, opted-out, and missing-phone totals, unions the selections, and deduplicates contacts. Membership is evaluated again when the broadcast actually sends.

Best Practices

  • Name audiences descriptively — Include the criteria and timeframe in the name so anyone on your team understands what it represents
  • Keep audiences focused — Narrow, specific audiences are more useful for targeted campaigns than broad, generic ones
  • Review regularly — Check your audience sizes to make sure they're growing as expected
  • Deactivate unused audiences — Instead of deleting, toggle off audiences you're not currently using so you can reactivate them later
  • Check broadcast readiness — Make sure audience members have phone numbers and active marketing subscription before running campaigns
  • Custom Audiences — Import and manually curate an Audience
  • Visitors — Your centralized contact management hub
  • Broadcasts — Send messages to your audiences at scale

Keywords

audiences, smart audiences, automated audiences, custom audiences, audience segmentation, contact segments, marketing segments