Audience Manager v1.0

Part of CloudWizard Email Suite

Audience Manager is the subscriber identity layer of the suite — lists, members, consent, and cross-list segmentation. It's the single source of truth for who a contact is and what they've consented to, feeding Mail Engine campaigns directly and sharing a stable identity token with every other module.

Requirements

Step 1 — Install the Controller

Audience Manager runs inside the CloudWizard Controller. The controller handles authentication, shared database config, and module detection. Install it first.

public_html/CW/
  bootstrap.php
  config_path.php
  index.php          ← sends /CW/ to the admin login
  vendor/            ← bundled PHPMailer, shared across every module
  admin/
    index.php
    login.php
    logout.php
    settings.php
    setup.php
    style.css
    ...

Step 2 — Install Audience Manager

public_html/CW/AudienceManager/
  module.php
  bootstrap.php
  confirm.php
  unsubscribe.php
  lib/
    mailer.php
    strings.php
    audience.php   ← the one definition of "who is in this audience"
  admin/
    _bootstrap.php
    index.php
    lists.php
    list_edit.php
    subscribers.php
    subscriber_edit.php
    audience.php
    create_campaign.php
    unsubscribe_import.php
    stats.php

Step 3 — Activate your license

Overview

Audience Manager → Overview shows five stat cards — Total subscribers, Confirmed, Pending, Unsubscribed, and Lists — followed by a Subscribers by List table breaking those same confirmed/pending/unsubscribed counts down per individual list, so you can see at a glance which list is actually healthy versus which one is mostly unsubscribes.

Creating lists

From Audience Manager → Lists, click + New list. Every list needs a name, sender email, and sender domain. The slug is created from the name if left blank; accents and non-Latin letters are converted, so Uppdatering Månadsvis becomes uppdatering-manadsvis. A slug you type yourself is cleaned the same way.

Each list in the table shows its status, subscriber counts by state, and sender email, with Edit, Members, Stats, and Delete actions. Deleting a list requires typing the exact list name to confirm — this cannot be undone.

Confirmation & welcome emails

Every one of these settings lives on the list itself, not globally — open a list and click Edit to configure them. This means two lists can have entirely different confirmation wording, sender identity, and redirect behavior even on the same install.

What Audience Manager adds for you

• A confirm link. If a confirmation email's body has no {{confirm_url}}, a "Confirm my subscription" link is added at the bottom, in the list's language, so the email is never a dead end.
• An unsubscribe link. If a welcome email's body has no {{unsubscribe_url}}, an unsubscribe link is added at the bottom. Confirmation emails never carry one, because nobody has subscribed yet.
• Unsubscribe headers. Welcome emails carry the standard List-Unsubscribe headers, which lets mail clients such as Gmail offer their own Unsubscribe button. The one-click part follows the list's One-click unsubscribe setting.
• A plain-text version of every email, with the addresses of links kept in the text.

Languages & public name

Each list has one language, chosen from 25: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. Need the same newsletter in two languages? Make two lists. That keeps every email reviewable before it goes out, and each subscriber sees one language only.

The list's language decides:

• the default confirmation and welcome email text, written when the list is created;
• the confirmed page and the unsubscribe page a subscriber sees;
• the wording of the links Audience Manager adds to emails ("Confirm my subscription", "Unsubscribe");
• right-to-left layout for Arabic and Hebrew pages.

It never translates text you write yourself, which is sent exactly as typed. A member's own language tag (set on Add member and Edit member) is for your records: emails always follow the list's language.

Changing a list's language

When you change the language on a list's Edit page and save, each email is switched to the new language's default text only if its subject and body are both still the old language's default, or both blank. An email you have edited is left exactly as you wrote it. The message shown after saving says which emails were switched.

Public name

The list name is yours to label things, for example Newsletter EN. The public name is what subscribers see: on the confirmed and unsubscribe pages, and as {{list_name}} in emails. Leave it blank to use the list name. Set it on the list's Edit page; the admin screens keep showing the list name.

Managing members

Open Members on any list to see every subscriber on it, searchable by email or name and filterable by status. The table shows email, name, country, status, source and join date, plus — when Mail Engine is installed — how many of its campaigns the member has opened.

Adding one member

The Add member manually card takes an email, an optional name, a status and a language. A full name is split at the first space: Jan R Linnaey becomes first name Jan and last name R Linnaey, so a greeting can use just the first name. Correct the odd one on the member's Edit page. If the address is already in the system, for example on another list, its existing name and language are kept.

Choose Confirmed for someone who has agreed to hear from you, such as a business card handed over in person. Choose Pending if they still need to confirm, then click Send confirmation on their row. Confirmations are sent one member at a time on purpose. Sending again issues a fresh link and disables the old one.

Importing a CSV

The file needs an email column. Optional columns are name (split at the first space) or first_name and last_name, plus country, city and timezone. Details already stored for a subscriber are never overwritten, addresses already on the list are skipped, and everyone imported is added as Confirmed.

Editing and erasing

Edit opens the member's details: email, first and last name, language, country (ISO code such as BG or SE), city and timezone, plus their status on every list. Erase on a row removes the member from this list permanently, and deletes the subscriber record too if they are on no other list.

List stats

The Stats link on each list shows how it is doing: counts of confirmed, pending, unsubscribed and bounced or complained members, the confirm rate (confirmed as a share of confirmed plus pending), where members came from, and a chart of activity over the last 7 days, 30 days, 90 days or a year. The chart loads its library (Chart.js) from cdnjs.cloudflare.com in your browser. If that is blocked, the numbers still show but the chart does not.

When Mail Engine is installed and has sent campaigns, a tile shows Opened (of mailed): of the confirmed members who have been sent at least one Mail Engine campaign, the share who opened at least one. Hover over it for the raw counts. Measuring against members who were actually mailed keeps a large, partly mailed list from looking unengaged. Opens are counted with tracking images, and some mail apps, Apple Mail for one, load images automatically, so read the figure as an upper bound. Without Mail Engine there is no open data, and the tile and the Opens column are hidden.

Audience Builder

The Audience Builder lets you combine one or more lists into a single filtered audience — for sending, exporting, or both.

A preview of the first 50 matching recipients (email, name, country, city, timezone) is shown below the count for a quick sanity check before exporting or sending.

How unsubscribing works

The unsubscribe link in an email opens a page, in the list's language, that asks the subscriber to confirm. They are removed only when they press the button, so mail scanners that open every link in a message cannot unsubscribe anyone by accident. Unsubscribing applies to that one list. The member stays in the system with the status unsubscribed and a timestamp, the event is recorded in the consent log, and a member marked bounced or complained keeps that stronger status.

Mail clients that offer their own Unsubscribe button use the List-Unsubscribe headers described above and skip the page. Audience Manager itself sends only confirmation and welcome emails. Campaign emails sent through Mail Engine use Mail Engine's own unsubscribe link.

Bulk unsubscribe import

From Audience Manager → Unsub Import, upload a CSV of email addresses to unsubscribe them from every list you select. The file needs an email column header, or can be a single column of addresses with no header at all.

• Apply to lists — every active list is checked by default; uncheck any you don't want touched.
• Also add to suppression list — on by default. Prevents these addresses from being re-added even if they appear in a future import.
• Suppression context — leave blank for a global suppression (blocks sending from every domain), or enter one or more domains to scope the suppression to just those.

After import, a results summary shows how many were unsubscribed, how many were already unsubscribed, how many email addresses weren't found in the system at all, and (if enabled) how many were added to suppression.

Shared identity & suite integration

Audience Manager assigns a stable, permanent identity token to every subscriber it creates — whether via CSV import, manual entry, or a Signup Manager handoff. This token never changes for the lifetime of the install and is shared across every CloudWizard module that touches that email address, which is what keeps a subscriber's unsubscribe link valid for life regardless of which product or import they entered through.

Running standalone

Audience Manager works fully on its own — creating lists, managing members, running the Audience Builder, and bulk unsubscribe import all require nothing beyond the controller itself.

Without Mail Engine installed, the Audience Builder simply omits the campaign-related actions — you'll see Export CSV only, and can still filter and export your audience for use anywhere else.

A standalone install sends two kinds of email: the confirmation and the welcome email. Sending newsletters or campaigns takes Mail Engine.

Security

• Always use HTTPS. Subscriber records include email, name, and geo data — never run this over plain HTTP.
• The controller admin is protected by your admin password. Use a strong password (the setup wizard enforces a minimum length).
• List deletion requires typed confirmation. This is deliberate friction against an accidental click deleting thousands of subscribers — don't work around it with muscle-memory typing.
• Restrict admin access by IP if possible. In Nginx, inside the location block for your CW directory:
  

  allow 1.2.3.4;
  deny all;

• Review suppression scope carefully before a bulk unsubscribe import — a blank Suppression context blocks sending across every domain in the install, not just the lists you selected.

Troubleshooting

CloudWizard Email Suite — Audience Manager v1.0
cloudwizard.eu — support@cloudwizard.eu