Marketing Pro Onboarding Part 2: Create audiences

Overview

Now that you have set up your Marketing Pro settings, you can create your audiences. Audiences are central to your marketing efforts. They determine which customers receive what marketing content and when from your marketing campaigns. You can create audiences to retain existing customers or acquire new customers. Make sure to keep your marketing goals in mind when creating your audiences.

Before you create your audiences, you must understand how filters and groups, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and audience targeting and scoring work. Understanding these concepts will help you create your audiences.

Things to know

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

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

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

Step 1: Learn about Filters and Groups

Filters and groups 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

When creating audiences, 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 who meet the exclusion criteria will not be included in the audience, regardless of any inclusion criteria they meet.

• 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. 

Marketing Pro 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 a 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.

Step 2: Learn 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 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. 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 who 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.

Step 3: Learn about 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: The campaign will be sent to a very specific set of customers with a high likelihood that they will see and open it.

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

• Broad targeting: The 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.

Step 4: Create an audience to retain customers

If you don't need to create an audience to retain customers, skip to the next step. To create an audience to retain customers:

1. Go to Marketing > Audiences.

2. Click Create new.

3. In the Create Audience screen that opens, 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 an inclusion criteria group for the audience, 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.

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

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

9. When you're finished adding Include and Exclude groups, click Continue.

Step 5: Create an audience to acquire new customers

If you've created an audience to retain customers and don't need an audience for acquiring new customers, you can proceed to Marketing Pro Onboarding Part 3: Create email templates.

To create an audience to acquire new customers:

1. Go to Marketing > Audiences.

2. Click Create new.

3. In the Create Audience screen that opens, 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 the 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.        

   Note: You can only filter for up to five zip codes at a time.

6. Create a set of criteria you want to filter properties by, then click Continue.        

   Note: You can remove and edit filters.

Now that you've created your audiences, you can proceed to Marketing Onboarding Guide Part 3: Create email templates.

Want to learn more?

• See Overview: Using ServiceTitan Marketing Pro

• See Track audience email delivery history