Create audiences

Overview

In Marketing Pro, create audiences for marketing campaigns to achieve different goals, or use the same audiences across multiple campaigns. You can also define which customers are included in an audience to control who sees your marketing content.

Things to know

• Using Marketing Pro, you can create audiences to retain customers or acquire new customers.

• You can create audiences to retain customers if you have access to Email and Direct Mail campaigns.

• You can only use Acquisition Audiences in the Direct Mail campaigns.

• You can only use the Custom Fields filter to retain customers.

Work with filters and groups

To get the most out of Marketing Pro, it’s important to understand how groups and filters affect the inclusion and exclusion criteria of your campaigns. You can use small numbers of groups with many applied filters to target very specific customers or use multiple groups with few applied filters to include large numbers of customers in a single campaign.

Groups

In Marketing Pro, you can add one or more Include and Exclude groups. It’s important to understand how using single or multiple groups, as well as single or multiple filters, affects your audience. 

• One Include group: If you use a single Include group, then customers must meet all inclusion criteria to be included in the audience. This means that if you create a group that includes customers with an open estimate, in a particular ZIP code, and with an active membership, only customers that meet all of those criteria will be included in the audience.

• Multiple Include groups: So long as customers meet all of the inclusion criteria for any of your Include groups, they will be included in the audience.

  Note: Customers only need to meet the criteria for a single group to be included, regardless of how many groups your audience has.

• Include and Exclude groups: Any customers that meet the exclusion criteria will not be included in the audience, regardless of any inclusion criteria they meet.

• One Exclusion group: If you use a single Exclude group, then customers must meet all exclusion criteria to be excluded from the audience. This means that if you create a group that excludes residential customers who live in a specific ZIP code, only customers that meet all of those criteria will be excluded from the audience.

• Multiple Exclude groups: If customers meet all of the exclusion criteria for any of your Exclude groups, they will be excluded from the audience.

• Single filter within a group: If you use a filter that can accept multiple values, any customer that meets any of the values you select is included in the inclusion criteria for that group. For example, if you use the Membership Status filter and select both Suspended and Expired, customers with either Suspended or Expired membership statuses are included in the inclusion criteria for the group.

• Multiple filters within a group: If you use multiple filters within a single group, customers must meet at least one selection per filter to meet the inclusion criteria for that group.

Filters

To better target your audiences, Marketing Pro provides you with a wide range of filters.

You may want to use filters if you’re looking for events that happened on May 16, in the month of August, or 5 days ago. ServiceTitan gives you a variety of options for date-based inclusion and exclusion criteria, and allows you to choose between static or dynamic filters for things like membership end dates, scheduled job dates, and more.

There are two types of filters: Static and Dynamic. Generally, you should use static filters when building one-time campaigns, and dynamic filters for automated campaigns.

• Static filters: Filters that are for a specific window of time. For example, a fixed date (“May 16, 2023”) or range of dates (“Aug 1, 2023 - Aug 15, 2023”).

  Note: When using static filters in your audiences for events that happened on specific days, such as the last email date and the last completed job date, Marketing Pro only includes those events that happened before the chosen date. For example, if your audience’s Last Completed Job Date is set to May 16, 2023, only those customers who had jobs completed on May 15th or before will be included in the audience.

  

• Dynamic filters: Date filters that change relative to the current date. For example, customers who have an HVAC unit that was installed ten years ago, or customers with an estimate that’s more than one month old. You can set whether the filter:

  • works on days, weeks, months, or years

  • looks for events in the past or the future

  • is greater than, less than, between, or equal to a unit of time

For example, if you want to make sure you follow up with customers who had a service performed more than five days ago:

1. Select the Dynamic filter.

2. Under Recurring Service Event Date is, select Greater Than, enter 5, and select Day.

3. Select In the past.

This creates an audience of customers who meet these criteria.

Tip: You can update the audience filters to get a better-targeted audience. If the changes you made do not align with the campaign expectations, you can redo and undo the recent changes you made.

View Filter options

To view a filter option, you need to add the filters on an active customer, location, or job record. For example, to see a recurring service type as a filter option, you need to save the recurring service type to at least one active Location Record.

Another example of the Custom Fields filters:

1. Go to Settings > Operations > Custom Fields.

2. Click Edit.

3. Select where you want to see the Custom Field and click Save.

4. After that go to Settings > Marketing Pro > Custom Fields and enable the Use as Filter in Audience toggle as described in the Marketing Pro Custom Fields settings.

How inclusion and exclusion criteria affect audiences

Audiences can be dynamic and can include or exclude certain customers over time. For example, you can create an audience that sends marketing content to all of your customers in a particular ZIP code except those who recently booked a job with you. As more customers from that ZIP code book a job with you, the number of customers in the audience will decrease. When a customer leaves an audience due to a filter you set in a group, they are said to exit the audience.

Inclusion criteria and best practices

Which customers are added to your marketing campaigns depends on the inclusion criteria you select when building your audience. Inclusion criteria are different data categories in your business, like estimates, memberships, and invoices. Broadly speaking, the more inclusion criteria you add, the fewer customers will be included in your audience.

For example, you can set the inclusion criteria for one audience to include customers with open estimates over a certain dollar value, customers with a specific type of aging equipment, or customers that live in a particular ZIP code.

Exclusion criteria and best practices

Alternatively, exclusion criteria are how you remove certain customers from an audience. For example, you can set exclusion criteria for an audience to exclude any customers that you have emailed marketing content in the last week.

Tip: Create Exclude groups that use the Last Email Date, Scheduled Job Date, and Last Call Date options to make sure that you aren’t sending your customers too many marketing messages.

Audience targeting and scoring

When building an audience, your main goal is to get as many customers to open your marketing emails as possible. The more narrowly targeted your audiences are, the more likely that your customers will open your emails, see your content, and book jobs with you. As you build audiences, ServiceTitan automatically evaluates their targeting and shows you a targeting score.

There are three levels of audience targeting:

• Strong targeting: Campaign will be sent to a very specific set of customers with a high likelihood that they will see and open it.

• Moderate targeting: Campaign will be sent to a large set of customers, which means a lot of messages won’t be opened.

• Broad targeting: Campaign will be sent to a very large set of your customers, and there’s a good chance most of your messages won’t be read.

If the targeting score of your audience is moderate or broad, you can remove some of your inclusion group criteria, or add more exclusion criteria to lower the total number of customers.

Create an audience to retain customers

In Marketing Pro, audiences are central to your marketing efforts. They determine which customers receive what marketing content and when. Create as many or as few audiences as you need.

To market to customers in your audiences list: 

1. Go to Marketing > Audiences.

2. Click Create new. The Create Audience screen opens.

3. Select Retain Customers using Email or Direct Mail campaigns to target customers existing in your database.
   

4. Enter a unique and meaningful name for your audience to help your team identify it from the others. Then, click Begin. A new screen opens with options to add groups.

5. To create a set of criteria for both Include and Exclude to define which customers will receive emails for the campaign, go to Include and click Add Group.
   

6. Click a category and use the filters to build your audience.
   
   

   Note: The list of required information changes for the Recurring Service Events audiences.

   1. (Optional) If you want to add additional inclusion criteria groups, click the icon beneath your first group. Add as many as you need.

   2. (Optional) If you want to add an exclusion group, go to Exclude and click Add group.

7. When you’re finished adding Include and Exclude groups, click Continue.

Note: For Marketing Legacy, you can only create email campaigns. That is why you can create audiences to retain customers only.

Example retention audiences

When creating audiences, keep your marketing goals in mind. For example, do you want to follow up with customers with open estimates or reach out to customers with expiring memberships? Your goal helps determine which inclusion and exclusion criteria to include for your audience.

See example audiences for retaining existing customers below:

You can also target customers based on non-job-related data using the Invoice Date filter. This filter includes all invoices, whether or not they are linked to a job. For example, you can use it to target non-job invoices such as membership renewals or sales in addition to job-related transactions.

See example audiences below that use the Invoice Date filter:

Create an audience to acquire new customers

To acquire new audiences using the Direct Mail channel in Marketing Pro:

1. Go to Marketing > Audiences.

2. Click Create new. The Create Audience screen opens.

3. Select Acquire New Customers.

   Note: You can only use Acquisition Audiences to acquire new customers through the Direct Mail feature in Marketing Pro.

   

4. Enter a unique and meaningful name for your audience to help your team identify it from others then click Begin. The Acquisition Audience Builder opens with an interactive map interface of your local service area. This data comes from public and local home assessment records. The Acquisition Audience Builder can help you market more effectively and acquire new customers within your local area.

   Note: Data may not always be available or updated based on state, city, or county practices.

   

5. Select up to five ZIP codes you want to target in your service area by searching for them specifically, or by searching for the city you want to target through your direct mail marketing campaign.

6. Add the inclusion and exclusion criteria you want to filter properties by.

   Note: You can view the percentage of properties that meet your criteria and are registered to different owner addresses than the property’s location. This information can help you decide where to send direct mail for acquisition campaigns—either to the property owners’ addresses or directly to the property addresses.

7. When finished, click Continue.

Example acquisition audiences

When creating audiences to acquire new customers, keep your marketing goals in mind. For example, do you want to reach out to potential customers in a certain ZIP Code or recently purchased homes? Your goal helps determine which inclusion and exclusion criteria to include for your audience.

See example audiences for acquiring new customers below:

Inclusion and exclusion criteria category descriptions

Estimates

Memberships

Equipment

Customer

Location

Job

Call

Invoice

Recurring Services

Acquisition Audience Builder

Marketing Behavior

Want to learn more?

• See Overview: Using ServiceTitan Marketing Pro

• See Manage Marketing Pro Audiences

• See Marketing Pro Custom Fields settings