Lists - Audience List

Audience Lists are used to define the target of a message or journey and personalize the message with data from the list. An Audience List contains in general the global contact details, demographic information, language preferences etc. This type of data is not likely to change over time.

Technical Note: The table name of an Audience List typically starts with USER_

When an Audience List is created, a series of default fields are automatically available. These default fields can be extended with custom fields when required.

Below, you can find an overview of the default fields:

  • ID — Unique ID of the contact. Engage always uses the ID field as unique key in all lists. You can also add your own custom identifier to the Audience List (e.g., CUSTOMER_ID) and when creating linked lists, link to this field in your linked list.
  • MAIL — Email address of the contact. Engage always sends the email to the value in the field. The field name can't be customized in the editor. For example, it is not possible to change this field name to MAIL2.
  • NAME — Name of the contact. Usually this field holds the last name or full name of the contact. You can create your own custom fields to store the name (e.g., FIRSTNAME and LASTNAME).
  • OPTOUT — Indicates if the contact is opted in or out for all channels and all bulk communications (communication through batched journeys, not transactional or instant emails). A zero (0) or NULL value indicates that the contact is opted in (for example through a subscription email). All other values indicate that the contact is opted out.
    • Optout field values can be :
      • 0 : opted in
      • null (empty) : opted in
      • all other values (eg. 4, 10, 100, 999, -123) : opted out
    • The following default values are used for an automatic optout :
      • 9 : list unsubscribe (when a user clicks a List Unsubscribe link in an email)
      • 911 : complaint
      • 10 : email quality unsubscribe

Technical Note: In messages containing a List-Unsubscribe header, contacts could be wrongly unsubscribed by spam detection tools checking links in message content. As these tests are usually GET requests, our backend functions only accept POST requests to restrict unsubscribe actions to valid human clicks.

  • TESTUSER — If set to 1, the contact can be selected as a test user when testing journeys and messages.
  • ONLY_TEXT — If set to 1, the contact receives the text version of the email. Email viewings won't be registered because the tracking pixel is an image and thus not included in the text version.
  • OPTOUT_SOURCE — The reason why the contact opted out. The field is not filled out automatically by the system.
  • SUBSCRIBE_SOURCE — The source through which the contact subscribed. For custom values, the field is not filled out automatically by the system.
  • CREATED_DT — Date on which the contact was created.
  • MODIFIED_DT — Date on which the contact was last updated.
  • OPTOUT_DT — Date on which the contact opted out. This date is filled out automatically when the value for the optout field changes.
  • LANGUAGE — The language of the contact. The language defines in which language the message will be displayed.
  • MOBILE — The mobile number of the contact. This field defines the mobile number to which an SMS, MMS is sent.
  • BOUNCEDT — The last time an email to the contact bounced.
  • BOUNCECNT — The bounce counter representing the amount of bounces per type. This information is used by the Email Quality functionality.

Note: Below is an overview of the structure of the bounce counter:
A (xxxxxxA) — Reserved position for future change
B (xxxxxBx) — Number of soft bounces
C (xxxxCxx) — Number of hard bounces
D (xxxDxxx) — Number of domain failures
E (xxExxxx) — Number of syntax failures
F (xFxxxxx) — Number of complaints (Contacts clicking the spam button)
G (Gxxxxxx) — Number of asynchronous bounces

In a fictional example, the value 5612340 can be divided into:


 

Test your knowledge about Audience Lists

The Optout field indicates if a contact is subscribed or not. Which values indicate that the contact is opted out?
A: value 0
B: value 9
C: value 10
D: value 911