What does MailChimp mean by audience? As the website says: “Your audience is where you’ll store and manage your contacts. Once you add your contacts, you’ll be able to send your first campaign. We’ll walk you through the process.”

When you sign up for MailChimp, MailChimp generates an Audience for you and adds you as a contact. An audience is where you collect and manage your contacts. A contact is someone who’s email is stored in your audience.

The Audience Dashboard, which is at the left near the top of the MailChimp website after you log in, will show you several things such as who is subscribed and unsubscribed, tags, tag groups and so on. You can manually add contacts in here.

The tag/untag action automatically adds or removes tags to help you organize your subscribers. Tags are labels that you create to help you organize your contacts. Tags are internal facing that only you will see. For example, you might have conversations with your contacts outside of MailChimp. You might meet them in person or they might make comments on your social media. You might want to tag this connection.

You’ll want to add your contacts to MailChimp. There are three ways to do this. Here is a video from MailChimp and it’s called How to Add & Import Contacts to an Audience Using Excel or Google Sheets.

Groups are another way to collect more data and better understand your contacts. Groups are customer facing. When you first sign up with MailChimp, you don’t have any groups. Groups let you categorize subscribers by things like interests and preferences.
Subscribers can select groups for themselves, or you can put subscribers into groups within Mailchimp.

If you have even a small list of contacts, you may want to place them in different segments. You can segment contacts based on a variety of factors and send content to just those groups. This is market segmentation. You might decide not to even use segments. Unlike tags, you are not adding any new information to your contacts. Instead, you are using the information you already have to create segments.

To create a segment, you’ll use conditions to filter contacts in your audience. You can create segments using almost any condition, like signup form data, tags, group preferences, email activity, and location. You can choose a single condition or combine up to five conditions with positive and negative relationships to target the right contacts. MailChimp has a lengthy article called All the Segmenting Options. A better article to start with is called Getting Started with Segments.