Audience Activation: Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to the most common questions about how Audience Activation builds audiences, times sends, and decides who's eligible to receive a message.
Audience Activation Basics
What is Audience Activation?
Audience Activation is Fullpath's automated email and SMS campaign engine. It segments a dealership's customer base into audiences, then runs recurring or one-time campaigns that reach those audiences on a defined cadence — handling everything from message compilation to delivery, opens/clicks, and reply handling.
What channels does Audience Activation send on?
Email and SMS. Each channel has its own eligibility rules (for example, SMS requires explicit opt-in, while email relies on unsubscribe/opt-out status), but both draw from the same underlying audience and campaign logic.
Audiences & Targeting
How does Audience Activation decide who's in an audience?
Audiences are built from customer and vehicle data — things like purchase date, service history, appointment activity, and engagement signals. A campaign is bound to one audience definition, and the audience's filter logic determines the customer set the campaign draws from at send time.
What is a vehicle-scoped audience, and how is it different from a standard audience?
A standard audience returns one match per customer. A vehicle-scoped audience returns one match per qualifying vehicle — so a customer who owns two vehicles that are both due for service, for example, is evaluated and messaged once per vehicle rather than once overall. This exists so messaging can reference the correct vehicle instead of defaulting to whichever car happens to be on file.
Can a campaign be excluded from certain dealerships or dealer groups?
Yes. Campaigns support exclusions at the individual dealership level, the dealer-group level, or for Curator specifically. This is commonly used when a group needs a customized variant of a campaign and the original, unmodified version needs to be kept from reaching that group.
Send Timing & Frequency
How often does a recurring campaign send to the same contact?
Recurring campaigns run on a repeat-day cadence (send, wait N days, send again). The cadence, along with things like quiet periods, is set up as a default per campaign with room for dealership-level customization rather than a single fixed rule for every client.
Does Audience Activation avoid sending on weekends?
By default, yes — if a scheduled send date falls on a Saturday or Sunday, it automatically shifts to the next weekday. Like the send cadence itself, this is a default with room for dealership-level customization rather than a hard rule applied identically everywhere.
What time of day do campaigns send?
Campaigns are scheduled into one of three windows — morning, afternoon, or evening — each mapped to a specific send time. Which window a given campaign uses is a setup-level choice.
Is there a cap on how many emails or texts go out for a given campaign?
Yes, when a process is configured to distribute deliveries uniformly across its campaigns, each campaign has a maximum delivery count it won't exceed for that run. This is a throttle on delivery volume per run, separate from the per-contact send cadence described above.
Do vehicle-scoped campaigns follow the same frequency rules as standard campaigns?
Not entirely. Because a vehicle-scoped campaign can message the same customer more than once in a run (once per qualifying vehicle), it's built to bypass the standard "days between emails" / "days between SMS" spacing rule that governs ordinary campaigns — otherwise a customer with multiple qualifying vehicles could only ever be reached about one of them. Campaign-level and service-campaign-level eligibility rules still apply on top of this.
Recipient Eligibility & Suppression
What can stop a contact from receiving an email or text?
A number of independent checks run before a delivery is created, including: opt-out/unsubscribe status, invalid or unverifiable address/number, prior suppression, expected bounce, presence on an exclusion list, and (for SMS) opt-in status and snooze state. Any one of these failing blocks that specific delivery without affecting the rest of the campaign run.
What happens when multiple contacts share the same email address or phone number?
Shared contact info (a household email or phone shared across customer records) is handled by a household policy: a shared recipient only receives a delivery if it's recognized as shared within an eligible household relationship. This prevents the same inbox or phone from being messaged separately for every customer record attached to it.
What is "sunset," and how does a contact enter it?
Sunset is a suppression state applied to a recipient based on prolonged non-engagement. Once a recipient is in sunset, campaigns stop sending to that recipient until they re-engage. Exact thresholds are tuned at the engagement-tracking layer rather than hardcoded per campaign.
Data & Personalization
How does Audience Activation use third-party data to decide who's eligible for email sends?
For email recipients whose contact record was enriched using Fullpath's third-party data + AI-powered Identity Resolution, eligibility also depends on whether the dealership is within its identity-resolution sending limits and whether that specific customer is flagged as allowed. This is an additional eligibility layer on top of the standard opt-out/suppression checks above, and it only applies to enriched email recipients — it has no equivalent check on the SMS side.