Admin-managed dynamic lists in Group Send

Problem statement

Group Send today only offers a single default audience of all people. Individual users can build their own dynamic lists, but there is no way for an admin to build a list once and publish it to everyone who has Group Send access.

For large teams, this creates two problems.

Training doesn't scale. In a team of several hundred Group Send users, delivering a consistent list means training every one of those users to build the same list the same way. That isn't realistic, so in practice it doesn't happen.

Correctness is at risk. Building these lists correctly often requires nuanced configuration — excluding blocked or opted-out contacts, handling inactive users, applying the right filter logic. A CSM or consultant isn't expected to know those rules. When list construction is left to each individual user, sends go out against inconsistent and sometimes incorrect audiences. There is no way for an admin to enforce a governed audience definition.

The result is that teams fall back on manual workarounds. The most common pattern: a user sees an actionable cohort in a home page widget — for example, new users who have opted out of onboarding — then exports that list, copies the contacts, and pastes them into Group Send by hand. The alternative is asking the user to rebuild the equivalent report inside Group Send from scratch, which most users can't do because they have no visibility into how the original report was configured.

Proposed solution

Add an admin-defined section within Group Send containing dynamic lists that admins create and publish to all Group Send users.

• Admins build and maintain the list definitions centrally, including any exclusion logic (blocked contacts, inactive users, opt-outs)
• Published lists appear to end users as selectable, predefined audiences alongside the existing default
• Lists refresh dynamically, so users always send against current membership
• Admins control which lists are published and to whom

This puts audience definition where the expertise sits and removes the requirement to train every end user on list construction.

Acceptable interim solution

If a full admin-managed dynamic list layer is too large for near-term delivery, static list upload would deliver most of the value:

Allow a user to upload a list of contacts directly into Group Send, select a template, and send.

Many teams already use list-building tools with far richer filtering criteria than Group Send exposes. Being able to generate a list in those tools and upload it into Group Send would let that outbound traffic stay inside Gainsight instead of being sent through an external platform, which is what happens today.

Longer-term direction

The ideal end state is a native connector from home page widgets into Group Send: select contacts directly in the widget, click through, and land in Group Send with that audience already loaded. This would eliminate the export-and-paste workaround entirely. We recognize this is a larger piece of work and are raising it as directional context rather than the immediate ask.

Business impact

• Removes a recurring manual export-and-paste step from routine outbound workflows
• Eliminates the need to train hundreds of users on identical list construction
• Gives admins a governance control over send audiences, reducing the risk of emailing blocked, inactive, or opted-out contacts
• Keeps outbound sends inside Gainsight rather than pushing them to external email tools