Audiences

Recipients you paste or upload belong to that campaign and are not added to your contacts. They can't be tagged, segmented, or reused in another campaign, and their engagement won't show against a contact — nobody exists to show it against.

That is the intended split, not an oversight: a campaign's list is encrypted at rest, while the contact list is stored readably so it can be searched and segmented. Uploading to a campaign is therefore the right choice for a one-time send to a list from somewhere else, and the wrong one for anything you plan to message again.

To build something reusable, import the list under Contacts → Import and save an audience from it. One exception worth knowing: if someone you uploaded later opts in — replies to your START keyword, say — that opt-in does add them to your contact list, through the consent path rather than the campaign.

The Audience tab of a draft campaign opens on your saved audiences, which is the path to reach for: they are built from your contact list, reusable, and a dynamic one re-checks itself on every run. If you need a list that exists only for this campaign, choose Use a one-off list instead and paste or upload it. The format is forgiving — RCSync accepts E.164 numbers (+15555550123), 10-digit US numbers, and most common formats. Anything that doesn't parse as a valid phone is dropped before send and surfaced as “invalid” on the audience preview.

On an email campaign the audience is email addresses instead. An uploaded CSV is scanned for the email column rather than a phone column, and anything that isn't a valid address is dropped the same way.

An uploaded file must be CSV or XLSX and under 25 MB. Split a larger list into several files, or import it into your contact list once and build a saved audience from it.

• Deduplication — duplicate phone numbers (or email addresses) within the list are merged into one recipient.
• Validation — anything that doesn't parse as a phone number, or as an email address on an email campaign, is dropped.
• Suppression — recipients on your brand's suppression list are removed. See how a recipient lands on it below.

The audience preview shows each of these as a separate number — “X recipients, Y suppressed, Z invalid” — so you can spot a problem before sending. The brand's frequency caps are tracked separately (see Governance & compliance) and are not yet reflected in the preview.

Audience uploads and per-run snapshots are encrypted at rest. Brand suppression and override lists store one-way hashes of phone numbers and email addresses — useful for matching but not reversible. A list you upload to a campaign is not readable back out of that campaign.

Suppression is per brand, not per campaign — once someone is on the list, every future campaign from that brand suppresses them automatically. Four things put them there, all of them automatic:

• Replying STOP to an RCS or SMS message from your brand. The reply is captured by RCSync's inbound webhook and the number is suppressed.
• Clicking unsubscribe in one of your emails. The one-click unsubscribe in the email footer suppresses that address.
• A hard bounce — the address doesn't exist or permanently rejected the mail. Continuing to send to it damages your sending reputation, so it's suppressed on the first hard bounce.
• A spam complaint — the recipient marked one of your emails as junk.

Each record keeps why it was suppressed, so you can tell a deliberate opt-out from a dead address. You can see and export the whole list from the Consent page.