Audiences

Your audience is the people you send to and the ways you organise them. It has four parts, each a tab under Audience in the dashboard: Contacts, Properties, Segments and Topics. Together they let you target broadcasts and personalise their content, while honouring each recipient's choice about what they receive.

Contacts

A contact is one recipient — an email address (unique within your team), an optional first/last name, a subscribed flag, and any custom property values.

• Add contacts — paste one or more addresses (comma- or line-separated) and, optionally, drop them straight into existing segments.
• Import — upload a CSV to add contacts in bulk.
• Edit a contact — change its name and property values, move it between segments and topics, or flip its subscribed status.

Subscribed vs. unsubscribed is the master switch. An unsubscribed contact is excluded from every broadcast — SendGrail never emails someone who has opted out. This is a reputation safeguard, not a preference you can override.

Properties

Properties are typed custom fields you define once and then set per contact — for example Gen (text) or Plan (text/number). Each has a key, a type, and an optional fallback used when a contact has no value.

Properties are how you personalise a broadcast: reference one as a {{{contact.Plan}}}-style variable in the broadcast body and it renders each recipient's own value at send time. A property's type is fixed after creation (so existing values stay valid); the key and fallback can be edited.

Segments

A segment is a named, static group of contacts — "Beta users", "Paid customers", and so on. Use segments to target a broadcast at part of your audience instead of everyone.

• Create a segment (just a name), then add contacts to it — from the Add-contacts flow, the contact editor, or the Contacts bulk actions.
• Clicking a segment opens the Contacts tab filtered to that segment, so you always see exactly who's in it.

Topics

Topics are subscription categories that put recipients in control of what kinds of email they get — "Product updates", "Newsletter", etc. Each topic has:

• a default — opt-in (off until a contact subscribes) or opt-out (on until they leave), and
• a visibility — public topics appear on your hosted unsubscribe page so recipients can manage them themselves; private topics are managed only by you.

When you send a broadcast to a topic, contacts who have unsubscribed from that topic are excluded — even if they're still globally subscribed. This lets someone stop the newsletter without losing their receipts.

Customise the recipient-facing unsubscribe page (colours, copy, logo) from Topics → Customize page.

How it fits together

• Broadcasts target either all contacts or one or more segments, and automatically exclude unsubscribed, topic-unsubscribed and bounced contacts.
• Properties personalise a broadcast's content per contact.
• Topics and the unsubscribe page give recipients granular control, which keeps complaint rates — and your sending reputation — healthy.

Next steps

• Suppressions — the account-wide do-not-send list, distinct from a contact's subscribed flag.
• Templates — reusable, variable-driven email content.