Audience Management — Complete Guide

Audiences are the foundation of everything you do in FuriosaCRM. Every signup, every import, and every integration sync feeds into your audiences, giving you a single, unified view of all your contacts. This guide covers everything from creating your first audience to advanced segmentation with groups, importing from spreadsheets, and keeping your data clean.

Overview

An audience in FuriosaCRM is a collection of contacts. Each audience has its own dedicated database table that stores all contact profiles with fields like email, phone, first name, last name, source, UTM parameters, and custom data. You can create multiple audiences for different purposes — for example, one for your festival mailing list, another for your club night regulars, and a third for your corporate events.

Audiences are tied to campaigns. When you create an email, SMS, or WhatsApp campaign, you select which audience to send to. Within an audience, you can further segment contacts into groups for more targeted messaging. For example, within your festival audience you might have groups for "VIP Buyers", "Early Birds", and "Waitlist".

Every contact in an audience has a unique profile that tracks their source (how they joined), their submission date, any UTM parameters captured, and their interaction history across your campaigns. This data powers personalisation, segmentation, and analytics throughout the platform.

Creating an Audience

To create a new audience, navigate to Audiences in the sidebar and click the Create Audience button. Enter a descriptive name for your audience. We recommend using a naming convention that includes the event name and year, such as "Summer Festival 2026" or "Club Night Q1 2026". This makes it easy to find and manage audiences as your collection grows.

Once created, your audience appears as a card in the Audiences list showing its name, total contact count, email count, and phone count. Click on any audience card to view its contacts, manage groups, or start an import. You can rename or delete audiences at any time from the audience detail page.

There is no limit to the number of audiences you can create. However, for most use cases we recommend consolidating contacts into fewer, larger audiences and using groups for segmentation rather than creating many small audiences. This approach makes campaign targeting simpler and ensures contacts are not duplicated across multiple lists.

Contact Profiles

Every contact stored in an audience has a rich profile containing all the data collected about them. The core fields available on every contact are:

• Email — The primary identifier. Every contact must have an email address. Duplicates within the same audience are automatically prevented.
• Phone — Stored in international format (e.g., +447700900000). Used for SMS and WhatsApp campaigns.
• First Name and Last Name — Used for personalisation in campaign templates via merge tags like {{first_name}}.
• Source — How the contact joined your audience: signup (from a page), csv_import, eventbrite, dice, or other integration sources.
• UTM Parameters — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, and utm_content are captured automatically when a contact signs up through a page with UTM parameters in the URL.
• Order Data — For contacts synced from ticketing integrations, order details such as ticket type, quantity, and order value can be stored.
• Created At — The timestamp of when the contact was added to the audience.

Custom fields added through the page builder (such as dropdown selections or custom text fields) are also stored on the contact profile and can be viewed, searched, and exported alongside the core fields.

Importing Contacts

FuriosaCRM provides a powerful four-step import wizard that makes bringing your existing contacts into the platform straightforward, even for large datasets with tens of thousands of rows.

Step 1: Upload File

Navigate to the audience you want to import into, click the Import tab, and drag your file onto the upload area or click to browse. FuriosaCRM accepts both CSV (.csv) and Excel (.xlsx) files. The file is parsed client-side using SheetJS, so your data never leaves your browser during the upload step.

Step 2: Map Columns

After upload, the wizard shows each column from your spreadsheet alongside a dropdown where you map it to a FuriosaCRM field (email, phone, first_name, last_name, or skip). The wizard attempts to auto-detect common column names, but you can override any mapping. You must map at least the email column to proceed.

Step 3: Preview

A preview table shows the first 10 rows of your mapped data so you can verify that columns are aligned correctly and data looks as expected. Check that email addresses are in the email column, phone numbers are in the phone column, and so on. If anything looks wrong, go back and adjust your mappings.

Step 4: Import

Click Start Import to begin. For small files (under 1,000 rows), the import happens immediately. For larger files, the import is queued in our Redis-backed background processing system. You will see a progress indicator, and you can navigate away — the import continues in the background. You will receive a notification when the import is complete, including a summary of rows imported, duplicates skipped, and any errors encountered.

Excel and CSV Support

FuriosaCRM accepts two file formats for imports: CSV (comma-separated values) and Excel (.xlsx). Both formats are parsed locally in your browser using SheetJS, which means large files are handled efficiently without uploading the raw file to our servers during the parsing step.

For best results, ensure your spreadsheet has a header row as the first row with descriptive column names like "Email", "Phone", "First Name", etc. The import wizard uses these headers for auto-detection. If your file does not have headers, the wizard will use column letters (A, B, C) instead, and you will need to map them manually.

There is no hard file size limit, but we recommend keeping imports under 100,000 rows per file. For very large datasets, split them into multiple files and import sequentially. The background queue system handles files of any size, but splitting helps with error tracking and progress visibility.

Contact Groups

Groups are subsets of contacts within an audience that you create for segmentation and targeted messaging. For example, within your "Summer Festival 2026" audience, you might create groups for "VIP Ticket Holders", "Presale Signups", and "Eventbrite Attendees".

To create a group, navigate to the audience detail page and click the Groups tab. Click Create Group, enter a name, and your group is ready. You can add contacts to groups manually by selecting them from the contacts list, or automatically during imports by specifying a target group. Contacts synced from integrations like Eventbrite are also automatically placed into named groups.

When creating a campaign, you can target an entire audience or a specific group within an audience. This makes groups incredibly powerful for segmentation — send a VIP-only presale announcement to your VIP group, a general reminder to the full audience, and a re-engagement message to contacts who have not opened recent emails.

A single contact can belong to multiple groups simultaneously. Removing a contact from a group does not delete them from the audience — it only removes the group association. Groups have their own contact counts and can be exported independently.

Contact Search

FuriosaCRM provides a powerful search function that lets you find contacts across all your audiences instantly. From the audience detail page, use the search bar at the top of the contacts list to search by email address, phone number, first name, or last name. Results appear in real time as you type.

For more targeted searching, you can filter contacts by specific fields using the filter dropdowns. Filter by source to see only contacts from a particular channel (e.g., only "eventbrite" sourced contacts), by date range to see contacts added during a specific period, or by group membership.

Search results can be exported directly to CSV by clicking the Export button. This is useful when you need to pull a specific subset of contacts for use outside FuriosaCRM, such as uploading a custom audience to an ad platform or sharing a list with a partner organisation.

Source Tracking

Every contact in FuriosaCRM has a source field that records how they were added to the audience. This tracking happens automatically and gives you valuable insight into which channels are driving your audience growth. Common source values include:

• signup — Contact signed up through one of your FuriosaCRM pages.
• csv_import — Contact was imported from a CSV or Excel file.
• eventbrite — Contact was synced from an Eventbrite event.
• dice — Contact was synced from DICE.
• ticketmaster — Contact was synced from Ticketmaster.
• meta_lead_ads — Contact was captured through a Meta Lead Ad.

In addition to source, UTM parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content) are automatically captured when a contact signs up through a page URL containing UTM tags. This allows you to track exactly which ad campaigns, social posts, or referral links drove each signup.

Audience Audit

Over time, audience data can develop inconsistencies such as duplicate contacts, mismatched counts, or stale records. FuriosaCRM includes built-in data integrity tools to help you keep your audiences clean and accurate.

Duplicate detection identifies contacts that share the same email address within an audience. While the system prevents exact duplicates during import and signup, edge cases like manual corrections or integration syncs can occasionally create near-duplicates. The audit tool flags these for review so you can merge or remove them.

Count verification ensures that the contact counts displayed on your audience cards match the actual number of records in the database. If a discrepancy is detected, the system automatically recalculates and corrects the stored counts. This process runs in the background and does not require any manual intervention.

Best Practices

Keeping your audiences well-organised and your data clean will pay dividends as your contact base grows. Here are our top recommendations:

• Naming conventions — Use a consistent format like "Event Name YYYY" or "Purpose - Quarter". This makes audiences easy to find and sort.
• Fewer, larger audiences — Use groups within audiences for segmentation rather than creating many separate audiences. This reduces duplication and simplifies campaign targeting.
• Regular imports — If you use external ticketing platforms, set up integrations for automatic syncing rather than relying on manual CSV imports. This ensures your audience is always up to date.
• Clean phone numbers — Ensure phone numbers are in international format before importing. FuriosaCRM attempts to normalise numbers, but providing them in the correct format from the start avoids issues with SMS delivery.
• Review sources — Periodically check the source breakdown of your audiences. This helps you understand which channels are most effective at growing your contact base.
• Export regularly — Maintain local backups of your audiences by exporting to CSV periodically. While FuriosaCRM maintains automated backups, having your own copy is good practice.