Create an audience list

An audience is a named group of contacts that a campaign sends to. Every campaign needs at least one.

Create it

Open Audiences and click New Audience. Fill in:

• Name — e.g. "Newsletter Subscribers".
• Description (optional) — a note for your team about who is in the list and why.

Save, and the list appears in the table with a Contacts count.

Put people in it

A new list is empty. There are three ways to fill it:

• Upload a CSV of contacts against the list — see Import contacts from a CSV.
• Connect your store. Shopify customers sync in automatically and keep syncing — see Connect your Shopify store.
• Capture ad leads. Connect Meta or Google Ads and leads from your lead forms arrive as contacts, without an export step.

Routing ad leads to the right list

Leads do not all belong in one list, so each ad connection has routing rules. Open the connection from Connections and add rules there.

When a lead arrives, the rules decide which list it is added to. They run in order and the first match wins, unless a rule is set to keep checking later rules. A rule can also apply tags as it files someone.

You can check a rule before trusting it with real traffic: Send test lead runs a synthetic lead through the real ingest path, so you see exactly where it lands.

Being in a list is not consent

Worth understanding before you build campaigns on routed leads: adding someone to a list does not subscribe them. Marketing consent comes from the lead form's own consent setting, or from the customer's Shopify preference — not from membership of a list.

Campaigns only send to contacts who can actually receive them, so a routed list can be considerably larger than its sendable audience. That is correct behaviour, not a bug.

Lists versus segments

A list is static: contacts stay in it until something removes them. If you want a group that maintains itself — everyone who bought in the last 30 days, say — you want a segment instead. The Audiences page links to this from its "Want an audience that updates itself?" prompt.

Both appear in the campaign builder's Audience dropdown, grouped under Lists and Segments, and a single campaign can send to several at once.

About the contacts count

The number in the Contacts column is how many contacts the list holds. It is not the number that will receive your next campaign — unsubscribed, bounced and invalid addresses are filtered out at send time, so the delivered count is usually lower.

The gap is widest on lists built from ad leads, for the consent reason above.

Next: open Audiences → New Audience, then add contacts with Upload.