Email Marketing and Audiences

Build your contact lists and segments, manage consent categories, design email templates, and review, approve and send marketing campaigns.

The Audience group in the sidebar holds everything you need to send marketing email from Babylon: the people you can contact, the rules for who gets what, the templates your emails are built from, and the campaigns themselves. It also holds related tools for editorial content, buyer activity profiles, automated engagement sends and creator attribution.

Marketing email is separate from the automated notifications Babylon sends when someone bids, wins or pays. Those are covered in Notifications and messaging.

This guide describes consent and unsubscribe behaviour as the product implements it. It is not legal advice: check your own obligations for the places you market to.

Before you start

Plan

Most of the Audience group is part of a marketing module that depends on your plan. If a screen described here is missing from your sidebar, or opens with a message that it is not part of your plan, it has not been switched on for your account. No change to your role will open it: ask your account owner or contact Hammerd support.

Lists, Contact Imports, Contact Attributes, Segments, Email Categories, Email Templates, Campaigns, Buyer Profiles and Engagement Triggers are all part of the marketing module.
Actually sending from an engagement trigger (Run this trigger) needs an additional automation feature on top of the marketing module. Without it you can see and edit triggers but not run them.
Articles is a separate editorial feature.
Creator Campaigns and Creator Links belong to the live commerce creator attribution feature. See Live commerce.

Permissions

The marketing screens need the manage tenant settings permission.
Approving a campaign needs the separate approve audience campaigns permission. This lets you split authoring from approval: one person drafts, another approves.
Articles needs the moderate content permission.
Users needs the view users permission.

See Team members and roles for how to grant these.

Sender address

Campaigns are sent from the From email you set on each campaign, but only if that address is on a sender domain you have verified under Settings → Domain Settings. Otherwise Babylon uses your default sender. See Custom domains.

How the pieces fit together

A contact is an email address you may market to. Contacts arrive when someone signs up to a list on your storefront, when you import a CSV, or when a registered user is linked to one.
Lists are named audiences people opt into on your storefront.
Segments are rule-based audiences, worked out fresh each time you use them.
Email Categories are the topics contacts can opt in or out of individually.
Email Templates define the look of your emails and which content blocks can be used.
Campaigns pick an audience, a template and content, then go through review, approval and sending.

A contact only receives a campaign if they have given consent for that campaign's purpose, have not unsubscribed or been suppressed, are not held in a quarantined import, and have not been emailed too recently. Every campaign shows you how many people are excluded for each reason before you send.

Users

Audience → Users lists every account on your marketplace: buyers, sellers and staff. For marketing purposes it matters in two ways:

Contacts linked to a registered account are treated as consenting when a campaign uses Send to all contacts (see Campaigns below), even if they never joined a list. This applies only to Send to all contacts, not to sends targeted at a list or segment.
A registered user who has switched off marketing email in their own account settings is always excluded from campaigns, whatever else they have agreed to.

Managing staff access is covered in Team members and roles, and identity checks in Identity verification.

Lists

Audience → Lists holds the named audiences people can opt into on your storefront, such as a launch list, a sale-alert list or a waitlist. Each list has its own sign-up form, an optional cap on places, and an open or closed state.

Creating a list

Click Create a list (or the create button on the list page) and fill in:

Key: a stable identifier the storefront uses, for example sale-alerts. Choose it carefully, as your storefront sign-up forms refer to it.
Name: what you and your team see.
Type: Capped (a fixed number of places) or Uncapped.

For a capped list, Cap & counter adds:

Cap: the total number of places.
Threshold: the confirmed count at which the storefront starts showing a countdown instead of hiding it.

For every list:

Show tally: when on, the storefront shows how many places remain, with a progress bar.
Is open: when off, sign-up boxes show your closed-list wording instead of a form.
Overflow list key: the key of another list that new sign-ups go to once this one is closed or full, for example a waitlist.

The Copy section holds the wording shown to visitors on the sign-up form. The keys are state_a (before the countdown shows), state_b (while counting down) and closed. You can change this wording at any time.

Sign-ups and confirmation

Storefront sign-ups use double opt-in. A new sign-up is Pending until the person clicks the link in their confirmation email, then becomes Confirmed and is sent a welcome email. Confirming also records their consent to All marketing.

Open a list to see its sign-ups, with their position, email, status, source and dates. From there you can:

Approve a pending sign-up by hand, for example when the confirmation email went to spam. This confirms them as if they had clicked the link and sends the welcome email straight away.
Export CSV to download the list.
Delete a sign-up. This removes it permanently without emailing anyone. Use it for test or junk sign-ups only. For a genuine unsubscribe request, ask the person to use the unsubscribe link, so their record is kept as Inactive.

The list page also has Import Contacts and Custom Attributes buttons, which open the next two screens.

Contact Imports

Contact Imports is reached from the Import Contacts button on Lists. It is not in the sidebar.

Importing a CSV

Click Import contacts.
Upload: give the import a Batch name and choose a CSV file (up to 10 MB). The batch name is also used as the name of the mailing list the import creates.
Map columns: for each column in your file, choose which contact field it fills: Email (required), First name, Last name, Country, Language, Timezone or Source, or leave it on Ignore this column. You must map one column to Email.
Preview: check the counts of Total rows, New, Duplicates and Errors, and any sample errors.
Click Import and confirm.

The import runs in the background and the batch page updates as it goes. Duplicates and rows with an invalid email are skipped. Custom contact attributes cannot be filled from an import.

Quarantine, release and suppression

Every import starts Quarantined. Quarantined contacts are excluded from every campaign until you decide what to do with the batch. Once the import has finished processing, the batch shows two actions:

Release: choose the Lawful basis you are relying on (Consent, Contract, Legal obligation, Vital interests, Public task or Legitimate interests), add any Notes, and confirm. Your name is recorded against the release.
Suppress: adds every contact the batch created to your suppression list, so they can never be emailed. This cannot be undone.

Releasing a batch lifts the quarantine, but it does not by itself make contacts sendable. Only a release with Consent as the lawful basis records marketing consent (for All marketing) for the contacts in that batch. Contacts released under any other basis stay excluded as having no consent until they give consent another way, for example by joining a list on your storefront.

If processing fails, use Retry. Rows already imported are not duplicated.

Contact Attributes

Contact Attributes is reached from the Custom Attributes button on Lists. Attributes are extra facts you want to hold about contacts, beyond the built-in fields.

For each attribute, set:

Key: a stable identifier used in segment rules, for example preferred_category.
Label: the name shown to staff.
Data type: Text, Number, Yes/No, Date, Single choice or Multiple choice. For Single choice, list the allowed Options.
Is filterable: makes the attribute available as a condition in the segment builder.
Is sortable and Is displayable: control sorting and whether it shows as a column when browsing contacts.

There is currently no screen in the admin panel for entering attribute values on individual contacts, and imports cannot fill them. Contact Hammerd support if you need to load attribute values.

Audience → Email Categories defines the topics contacts can opt into or out of individually, such as sale alerts or a weekly digest. Each category appears as a toggle on your public preference centre, and as a purpose you can choose for a campaign.

For each category, set:

Key: a stable identifier, for example sale_alerts. It becomes the campaign purpose.
Label: what contacts see on the preference centre.
Description and Sort order: optional wording and the order categories appear in.
Default state: Granted (opt-out model) or Withdrawn (opt-in model). This controls how the toggle first appears on the preference centre for a contact who has never set a preference for this category.
Active: inactive categories are hidden from the preference centre and from the campaign purpose picker.

Understand what a category does and does not do before you rely on it:

A campaign with a category as its purpose only reaches contacts with an explicit granted consent for that exact category.
Being on a list, or having consented to All marketing, does not count as consent to a specific category.
The Default state does not create consent. A contact shown the toggle as on by default has not granted consent for that category, and saving their preferences with the toggle left on does not record consent either.

Creating a category therefore does not, by itself, give you anyone to send to under it. If you want an existing audience to be reachable under a new category, that consent has to be collected. Contact Hammerd support if you need to discuss moving existing consent across.

What contacts see

Every campaign email has a footer added automatically, which you cannot remove or edit. It shows your legal name and postal address from your business profile (see Business profile and localisation), plus Manage preferences and Unsubscribe links.

Unsubscribe is one click. It withdraws consent for that campaign's purpose and adds the address to your suppression list, so it receives no further marketing email from you.
Manage preferences opens your preference centre, where the contact can turn individual categories on or off, or unsubscribe from everything.

There is no screen for editing your suppression list. Contact Hammerd support if an address has been suppressed in error.

Segments

Audience → Segments lets you define an audience by rules rather than a fixed list, for example "bid in the last 30 days and has not bought". Segment membership is never stored: it is worked out fresh every time you preview or send.

Building a segment

Click Create a segment and give it a Name and optional Description.
Under Rules, set Match to All of these (AND) or Any of these (OR).
Add conditions. For each one, choose a Field, an Operator and a Value (or several Values for "is any of" and "is none of"). For "within the last N days" operators, the value is a number of days.
To combine AND and OR, set a row's Row type to Group (nested AND/OR of conditions) and add Nested conditions inside it. Groups can only be one level deep.
Click Preview audience to see the number of Matching contacts and a random sample of up to 25, including unsaved changes.
Save.

The Field list is grouped. It includes:

Contact: email, name, country, language, source channel, UTM data and import batch.
Account: whether the contact is registered, identity verified or has a payment method on file, and when their account was created.
Behaviour: bid, win, watchlist, purchase, question and live show counts, non-payments and disputes, categories engaged with, and dates of last engagement, bid, purchase, win, message and live activity.
Commercial: lifetime spend, total bid amount and average bid.
Seller: whether they have submitted, have live listings, have sold, have unsold items or have a payout pending.
Engagement: last opened, last clicked, campaigns received, never engaged and bounce state.
Consent: All marketing, Transactional, and each of your active Email Categories.
Attributes: any Contact Attributes marked as filterable.

Behaviour and commercial fields come from buyer profiles (see below), so they are only as current as the most recent profile update.

A segment's page shows its Last count, when it was Last evaluated, its Count history, and attribution figures for campaigns sent to it.

Email Templates

Audience → Email Templates holds the reusable designs your campaigns are built from. A campaign cannot be sent until at least one template has a published version.

Creating a template

Click the create button and enter a Name, an optional Key and a Description.
Under Version, choose the Permitted blocks campaigns built on this version may use. The footer is always added automatically and is never listed.
Under Styles, set a Primary color and Background color (hex values such as #1E40AF) and a Font family from the list offered.
Optionally add Starter content: blocks that are copied into a new campaign when this version is chosen. Campaign authors can still change them.
Leave Publish immediately on to make the version available to campaigns straight away, or turn it off to keep it as a draft.
Save. The Preview panel shows the result as you work.

Versions

Template versions cannot be changed once created. To change a template, open it, go to its versions and click Add version. The new version starts from the latest version's settings. A version that was not published straight away can be published later with Publish.

Campaigns pin a specific published version, so publishing a new version does not change campaigns already built on an older one. View skeleton shows the generated email markup for reference only. You cannot hand-edit template markup.

Campaigns

Audience → Campaigns is where you build, review, approve and send marketing email. Every send, whether you write it or an engagement trigger creates it, appears here.

Building a campaign

Click Create a campaign and fill in the sections.

Campaign:

Name: for your own reference.
Subject and an optional Preheader (the preview text many inboxes show after the subject).
From name, From email and an optional Reply-to. See Sender address, above.
Purpose: All marketing or one of your active Email Categories. This decides whose consent counts.

Audience, with three Audience type options:

Mailing list: pick one list.
Segment: pick one segment.
Custom mix (lists, segments, all contacts): tick any combination of Mailing lists and Segments, or turn on Send to all contacts. You must choose at least one list or segment, or send to all.

Template: choose a published Template version. If none is offered, the helper text tells you what is missing: no template, no version, or a version that has not been published.

Content: add blocks with Add block, reorder and collapse them. Only the blocks your template version permits are offered:

Masthead: your header.
Text: a rich-text Body.
Image: Image URL and Alt text (both required), an optional Link URL and optional Width (px).
Static lots: hand-pick Lots by searching titles. Only lots that will display in the email are offered.
Dynamic lots: lots chosen automatically at send time (see below).
Call to action: a button with a label and a link. One per campaign.
Divider: a separating line with a Style.

The Preview panel beside the content updates as you edit.

Dynamic lots

A Dynamic lots block picks lots for you when the campaign is sent, so a recurring email always features current lots. Configure:

Filter: conditions on lot fields, with Match set to all or any, in the same way as segment rules.
Sort: one or more fields, each Ascending or Descending.
Limit: the most lots to include.
Minimum results: the fewest lots worth sending.
If below minimum: Hold campaign (the default: the campaign is held and not sent), Omit block (send without this block) or Send anyway (send with however many were found).
Layout and Fields to show: both must be filled in.
Exclude previously seen lots: leaves out lots the recipient has already been sent.

The preview shows a placeholder for this block, because the lots are only chosen at send time. Every recipient of a send sees the same lots.

Testing

On the campaign's page, Send test email sends the campaign to any address you enter (your own by default). It is available as soon as a template version is chosen, at any stage. Test emails are not sent to suppressed addresses.

Review and approval

Campaigns move through these states: Draft, In review, Approved, Scheduled, Sending, Sent, and sometimes Held, Paused, Cancelled or Failed.

When the draft is ready, click Submit for review.
A reviewer either clicks Return to draft (with an optional Note) or Approve. Approve is only shown to people with the approve audience campaigns permission.
When approving, choose what happens under After approving: just approve and send or schedule later (the default), Send now, or Schedule for later.

A campaign cannot be approved unless it has a template version, its content is valid, and at least one person is eligible to receive it.

You can still edit a campaign while it is in draft, in review, approved or scheduled. Editing an approved campaign sends it back to Draft and clears the approval, so it must be approved again.

Checking the audience

The campaign page shows an Audience preview with Candidates (everyone in the chosen audience), Eligible (who will actually receive it), and how many were excluded for being in a quarantined import, having no consent for the campaign's purpose, or being suppressed. A Frequency cap note explains that contacts emailed too recently are also held back at send time.

If Eligible is much lower than you expect, the most common reasons are imports released without Consent as the lawful basis, and a purpose set to an Email Category that few contacts have explicitly granted.

Scheduling and sending

From Approved:

Send now starts sending immediately, after confirmation.
Schedule sets a Send at date and time, interpreted in the Timezone you choose. Unschedule takes a scheduled campaign back to approved.
Repeat (RRULE, optional) turns the campaign into a recurring one using a standard recurrence rule, for example FREQ=WEEKLY;BYDAY=MO for every Monday. Leave it blank to send once. A recurring campaign does not send itself: each occurrence is created and sent on schedule, and appears under Recent occurrences.

While sending, Pause stops the send and Resume continues it. Cancel is available until sending starts, with an optional Reason.

A campaign shows Held if a Dynamic lots block set to Hold campaign found fewer lots than its minimum.

Reporting

Once sent, the campaign shows Sent, Delivered, Failed, Unsubscribed, Complained, Bounced, Clicked and Opened (unreliable). Opens are marked unreliable because many email clients load or block images automatically. Attribution figures (watchlist adds, identity verifications, bids and attributed hammer value) show what recipients did afterwards. Use Refresh attribution to update them.

Engagement Triggers

Audience → Engagement Triggers holds named reasons to contact buyers, each tied to an Occasion: Auction Launch, Ending Soon, Outbid Recovery, Similar Items, No Bid Rescue, Dormant Reactivation or Second Chance Follow-Up. The occasion sets the default audience (for example, people who watched or bid on the lots concerned) and the attribution window.

Babylon creates the standard triggers for you the first time you open the screen. These show as Standard and cannot be deleted, but you can switch them on or off with Active. You can add your own with a Name, an Occasion, a Description and the Channel (currently Marketing email).

Running a trigger

Open a trigger and click Run this trigger:

Lots to feature: the lots this send is about. Only scheduled and live lots are offered.
Audience: leave it to use the audience the occasion implies, or choose a segment to override it for this send only.
Campaign name: what the send is called in your campaign list.
Send at: leave empty to send as soon as the campaign is built.

Running a trigger creates a campaign and takes it through review and approval in your name, then sends or schedules it straight away. It does not wait for a separate reviewer, so the person running it needs the approve audience campaigns permission. The campaign uses the All marketing purpose and a published email template.

Running the same trigger again with the same lots, audience and schedule does not email anyone twice: you are told the send had already been made and can open the existing campaign.

Sending from a trigger needs the automation feature described under Before you start. Without it you see Sending is not available with an explanation.

Buyer Profiles

Audience → Buyer Profiles is a read-only summary of each person's activity on your marketplace: bids, wins, purchases, watchlist, questions, live show attendance, non-payments and disputes, plus how recently they did each. A profile also lists the segments the person currently belongs to.

Profiles are worked out from your marketplace data rather than entered by hand. When you first get access, click Rebuild buyer profiles and confirm with Rebuild now to build them from your existing data. After that they are kept up to date overnight. A rebuild overwrites existing profiles with recalculated values, marks buyers with no remaining activity as inactive, and makes sure the standard segments exist. It sends no email.

Articles

Audience → Articles lets you publish editorial content on your storefront, such as sale previews, market commentary or catalogue essays. It is a separate feature from the marketing module and needs the moderate content permission.

For each article:

Title (sentence case) and Body.
Publication: a Status of Draft, Published or Archived. Only published articles appear on your storefront. Publish at schedules publication. Leave it empty to publish immediately. The on-screen note tells you which time zone the time is in.
Details: an optional Slug (derived from the title if left empty), a By-line and an Excerpt of one or two sentences, used on the article index and in search engine metadata.
Hero Image: upload an image (1600 x 900 px recommended) or paste an image URL, plus Alt text.
Related Lots: link the article to published lots by searching their titles.

Creator Campaigns and Creator Links

These screens track sales brought in by people promoting your live shows. They depend on the live commerce creator attribution feature.

Audience → Creator Campaigns: a container for one promotion, with a Name, Description, Status (Draft, Active, Paused or Ended), start and end dates. Use Activate and Pause from the list.
Audience → Creator Links: a tracked link for one person. Choose the Show it points to, the Campaign it belongs to, and the Creator (an existing account on your marketplace), with an optional expiry. The Short Code and Full URL are generated for you. Each link reports Clicks, Conversions and GMV.

You need to have scheduled a live show before you can create a creator link. See Live commerce.

Troubleshooting and common questions

A screen says it is not part of your plan

The feature has not been switched on for your account. Ask your account owner or contact Hammerd support.

My campaign's Eligible count is zero and I cannot approve it

Check the exclusion counts in the Audience preview. Common causes: the imported contacts are still quarantined, the import was released under a basis other than Consent, the purpose is an Email Category nobody has granted, or everyone in the audience has unsubscribed.

Approve is missing

You need the approve audience campaigns permission, and the campaign must be In review.

My campaign went back to Draft

Someone edited it after it was approved. Review and approve it again.

My From email was not used

The address is not on a verified sender domain. Verify the domain under Settings → Domain Settings.

Someone says they unsubscribed but are still on a list

Unsubscribing stops marketing email to that address, even if they still appear on a list. They will not be emailed.