Matter Vs. Contact Type Audiences

Audiences allow you to send targeted content to a filtered group of recipients. This could include newsletters, firm announcements, birthday email, practice area-specific content, etc.

To create an audience, start by hovering on the Marketing tab at the top, and then select Audiences. When creating a new audience, you will need to select whether it is an audience of matters or contacts. Remember that a contact represents an individual person, whereas a matter is a case attached to an individual.

Note that you will not use the Clients option. If you wish to create an audience of your clients, you would create a matter type audience, and filter it for status = hired.

Contact Audiences

As a rule of thumb, any general marketing content such as newsletters and birthday emails should go to an audience of contacts. You will want to include any of your contacts in those types of emails, as opposed to creating an audience of matters which would only include leads and clients.

Keep in mind that the main purpose of an audience list is to send the targets an email using an email campaign. With that in mind, you will also want to make sure that you are creating your email template as the appropriate type.

So for example, if you are creating a birthday email template, make sure to create that email as contact type, and then your birthday audience list will also be contact type.

When you create an audience of contacts, you will have the ability to filter the audience using any contact type fields in your CRM, including contact custom fields.

This means that you could filter the list based on fields like birthday, occupation, address-city, etc. You will not be able to use any of your matter fields, such as practice area, converted date, status, stage, etc., to filter the contact type audience.

Matter Audiences

If you do wish to filter a list based on any matter fields, then you will need to create the audience as matter type. This can be useful for any of the following possible audience examples:

• Matters of a particular practice area
• Clients who hired within a certain timeframe
• Lost leads
• Current open cases
• Cases closed within a certain timeframe
• Matters who came from a particular referral source

Again, these are just some examples of targeted matter audiences you could create, but the possibilities are endless.

Matter audiences are also useful if your firm tends to have clients with more than one ongoing matter at a time. Let's say you are filtering an audience list based on practice area, if the client has ongoing matters in several different practice areas, 

For a matter type audience, you will be able to send an email that is either contact or matter type. But remember that for contact type audiences, you can only send contact type emails.

FAQ's

I accidentally created an email as matter type but I want to send it to a contact audience, can I change the type of the email?

No, you cannot change the type of an email after it has been created. Our support team may be able to change the type of the email from the back end, to ask for assistance, email us at support@lawmatics.com.

What happens if a contact on an audience list doesn't have a valid email address?

You can choose to filter an audience list to only show records that have a valid email address if you would like, but it is not strictly necessary. If a contact in your audience doesn't have a valid email address, they simply show up as a bounce in the email campaign statistics.