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Outbound audiences console

An outbound campaign needs an audience before it can send. The Outbound → Audiences page puts every audience surface the outbound studio needs in one place — lists, segments, the suppression list, and a frequency-caps summary — so you answer “who do we reach, and how often” from a single screen before you open the campaign wizard. The page composes the same lists, segment, and opt-out surfaces that live under Audience; anything you create or edit here is shared with the rest of the platform. The CDP side of the audience — the pipeline that publishes a segment to an external destination — is documented separately in Publish a segment to an external destination.

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1. Where outbound audiences plug in

The console stacks four surfaces in the order you work through them: Only the product name, the daily rate, and the segment recipe change as you move from building the audience to wiring it into a campaign; each surface is owned by its own guide, so follow the links above for definition and CRUD. The console’s subtitle carries the model in one line: lists are hand-curated rosters, segments group contacts by rules, the suppression list keeps opted-out contacts out of every send, and frequency caps stop fatigue. If you have already built an audience under Audience, the same record appears here without a copy step.

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2. Frequency-caps interplay

The frequency-caps card on this page is a read-back summary, not an editor. It shows how many caps are currently configured and links to Settings → Frequency caps, where the ceilings are created and changed. The card has three states:
  • No caps configured — a dashed empty state with a Set up caps shortcut.
  • N caps configured — the count of active per-channel caps with a Manage caps shortcut.
  • Load failure — an inline error with Retry, so a transient read hiccup does not force a page reload.
Caps decide how often one contact can receive messages on a given channel, and they are enforced at execution time across every send path — direct send, campaigns, and journeys. Because they apply to the contact, not to the campaign, a cap set here gates every campaign that resolves the same audience at send; the card is the outbound studio’s reminder that the ceiling exists before you launch. Cap definition itself — the per-channel windows and counts — lives in Frequency caps.

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3. Attaching an audience to a campaign

Attach an audience inside the campaign wizard; the console is where you prepare what you attach.
  1. Open Outbound → Campaigns and start a campaign with the campaign creation wizard.
  2. When the wizard asks for targeting, choose the audience: either a list or a segment built in this console (or under Audience).
  3. Review the targeting summary the wizard shows: the suppression list and frequency caps are applied automatically at send, not chosen as a targeting option.
  4. Launch the campaign; the send gate re-reads the audience at execution, so a segment refreshes to current membership while the suppression list removes opted-out members before dispatch.
A contact added to the suppression list between audience selection and launch is excluded — the send gate consults the ledger at execution, not the snapshot from when the campaign was drafted.

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4. Indirect targeting vs explicit list

A campaign audience is either explicit or indirect:
  • Explicit list targeting — you hand-pick the contacts (a static list). Membership changes only when you edit the list. Use it when the audience is a known roster — a partner event list, a VIP roll — and drift is a risk, not a convenience. See Static contact lists.
  • Indirect targeting via a segment — you name the rules; membership re-resolves from the CDP at each refresh and at send. Use it when the audience is a behaviour or trait — “opened the last three campaigns, no order in 30 days” — and the roster should move on its own. See CDP segments.
The console puts both choices side by side for exactly this decision. A segment that should also publish to an ad network or a webhook sink continues in Publish a segment to an external destination — the outbound studio needs only the resolved membership.
Attaching an audience does not override consent. At send time every recipient passes through the consent gates, independent of how they entered the audience:
  • The suppression list — contacts who have opted out (per channel or globally) are removed before dispatch; this console renders that list in place.
  • The send-time blocklist — carrier- and system-level blocks that apply regardless of campaign targeting; see Blocklist management.
  • Frequency caps — contacts who already received their per-channel ceiling are skipped at execution, even though they remain in the audience.
Consent and suppression are tenant-owned controls: your organization decides whom to opt out, whom to re-opt in, and how strict the gates are. Orbit enforces the resulting records identically on every send path, so a segment and a list attached to the same campaign face the same gates — the audience decides who is eligible, the gates decide who is actually sent.

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See also