Audience

Your audience is everyone you can reach in a project: each person is a contact, described by attributes (the data you know about them) and activity events (the things they do), grouped on demand through segments, and labelled with lists and tags. You'll find all of it under Audience in the dashboard, where the menu is split into Contacts, Segments, Data sources and Activity.

How the pieces fit together

• Contacts are the people. Each one has a profile with their attributes, their activity timeline, their commercial insights and their subscription status per channel. Browse them in the audience table, open one to see its profile.
• Attributes are the fields on a contact — name, phone, country, plus any custom or e-commerce fields your data brings in. Each has a data type that decides how it behaves in filters. You'll find them in Attributes & events.
• Activity events are timestamped actions — a placed order, a campaign click, an abandoned checkout — that build the contact's timeline and can be filtered on when you segment. Events are read-only; you don't type them in by hand.
• Segments are saved queries over attributes, activity and other segments. They stay up to date on their own and are what you target a campaign or automation at. Build them in Segments.
• Lists and tags are simpler labels for a fixed set of contacts that doesn't change on its own — covered alongside segments.

Contacts arrive from your data sources — a CSV import, a connector like Shopify, or the API — and Instasent unifies duplicates as they come in (see one contact per person below).

Where to go next

One contact per person

A contact's identity is anchored on a unique attribute — by default the mobile phone or the email. When new data arrives with the same value in a unique attribute, Instasent merges it into the existing contact automatically instead of creating a duplicate, so a person who reaches you through several sources stays a single profile.

Two rules to keep in mind:

• Empty values are never merged — a missing phone or email won't pull unrelated contacts together.
• Merging is automatic. It happens as data flows in (and when you mark an attribute as unique). There is no "merge two contacts" button in the dashboard; unification is a background behaviour, not a manual action.

How an attribute is marked unique — and what happens to existing contacts when you do — is covered in Attributes & events.

Subscription status shows here, the model is in Consent

Each contact profile shows whether they can be messaged on each channel under Channel preferences, and you can edit it by hand. The rules behind that — marketing preference versus suppression, opt-outs, and how a STOP propagates across channels — are explained once in Consent, the owner of the subscription model. The audience pages link to it wherever subscription state shows up.

Ready to look at a contact? Start with Contacts.