Why is segmentation and content is more important than ever to get the best inbox placement

Whether an email arrives in your inbox is more than ever determined by individual behaviour. Consideration is increasingly given to how relevant you are to the individual recipient, as a result of which your email is perceived as spam by one Gmail recipient and placed in the inbox of a different Gmail recipient. Positive signals (such as opening an email, moving it to a folder and adding the email address to the Address Book) increase the deliverability of your email.

Through careful segmentation and providing the most relevant content you increase the likelihood that the recipient responds positively to your email.

Segmentation

Respond to the preferences or the situation of your contacts by segmenting your contacts. This allows you to approach them more specifically and effectively. Some examples of segmentation:

• New subscribers to your newsletter
• New customers
• The most involved contacts (based on the response to your email, social sharing or order data)
• Inactive contacts (for example, non-opens for 6 months)
• Milestones such as birthdays, moving date or expected maintenance dates of products.

The information you need for segmentation can be partly obtained from Webpower, including by analysing the behaviour of the contacts in response to your emails. Other information, such as milestones, you can request by enriching your contact profiles and including them in your database, allowing you to apply segmentation (/ selections) here as well.

Next, you can segment your contacts by putting them into separate groups or, for example, by defining the criteria through filters in Webpower.

Targeted content

Once you know whom you would like to address the mailing to, you can write and design targeted content and place it in the mailing. Will it be a birthday mailing with a rebate or an activation mailing for your inactive contacts? Depending on the angle of the mailing, you can personalise and tailor the content. Some examples of targeted content:

• Subject and preheader: For your birthday
• Promotional offer: €5 gift with your next order
• Text and tone of voice: (first name), we have missed you!
• Current content via RSS, for example
• Conditional content: Show men and women a different image.

By tailoring your content to the target audience, your contact is more likely to experience your mailing as positive and this contributes positively to the deliverability of your mailings.