Marketing groups help you fine-tune your email sendouts based on the recipient's specified country / region and, in some cases, their language. With marketing groups you can be sure that each contact receives a variant of the email that matches their language and region settings but also the product assortment and price/currency, and therefore has maximum relevance to them. 

Each marketing group represents an email variant in the email design studio.

Marketing groups are created in the Configure Engage area of your Engage UI.

Marketing groups example

Imagine you have a marketing group set-up like this:

1. Contacts living in Norway who speak English
2. Contacts living in Norway
3. Contacts living in Germany or Austria
4. Contacts living in France who speak English
5. Contacts living in Germany or Austria who speak English
6. Contacts living in Belgium who speak French
7. Contacts living in Belgium with a language besides French (or no language registered)
8. Default (the group every contact belongs to if no other groups were made)

Here, it's clear that marketing groups can overlap and even be "inside" each other (for example all contacts in group 1 are also in the larger group 2). But each contact will still only belong to one.

Groups 4 and 5 above could in theory have the same email variant sent to them, as they share the same language and currency. But since they are different countries, they might have different prices or product assortments, and so would need to be separated into separate marketing groups. 

In general, a country / region could be given its own group if it has country-specific information. Also consider how your website will work. Will it detect the visitor's language or do you need unique links for each country/language?

The "Default" marketing group

Every contact in your system belongs to at least one marketing group. When your Engage environment is created, everyone is placed in the group named "Default". As you create more groups, any contacts who belong to those groups (based on their country and language settings) will be moved out of "Default". 

This means the "Default" group will only contain contacts who belong to no other group, and "Default" will grow smaller over time as more marketing groups are added.

Priority of marketing groups

It's quite likely that a specific contact could be placed in several marketing groups (like in the example above). But which one they actually belong to is decided using the priority of the groups. 

You assign a priority to every marketing group when it is created. If a contact could be placed in several marketing groups, the one they actually belong to is the one with the lowest priority value, and this will decide which email variant they get. While assigning a priority to a new marketing group is optional, if you don't do it then one will be assigned automatically. You can easily change the priority of groups in the UI.

Working with marketing groups

Creating marketing groups is something you won't do often. You'll do it when your Engage environment is set up, but after that, you probably won't need to change them much. And when you do, you'll most likely do it in conjunction with your Voyado AM.

Changes to your marketing groups: Every night, your Engage environment checks for any changes to your marketing groups. If a change is detected, all your contacts will be scanned and resorted into a marketing group (maybe even the same one as before). This is done automatically.

Changes to your contacts: If a change happens to a contact (they update their data, or have been added) they will immediately be sorted into the correct marketing group.

How contact are sorted into marketing groups

When a contact is updated or added, or a resorting of all marketing groups has been triggered, your contacts will be scanned and sorted into the correct group like this:

1. Each contact is checked against the marketing groups in priority order, starting with the highest priority group (the one with the lowest Priority value, which is usually 1).
2. The contact's country and language (if used) preferences are compared to those of the marketing group. If the contact matches, they will be assigned to this marketing group for this send-out, and the matching moves to the next contact.
3. If a match was not made, we move on to the marketing group with the next highest priority, and repeat the check, again comparing the contact's country and language.
4. We continue through all marketing groups, in order of decreasing priority, until a match is made. 
5. If a contact is not sorted into any of your marketing groups, they will be placed in the "Default" group. This group should always have the lowest priority (the highest priority value).

Using marketing groups in sendouts

Once you've created your marketing groups, this is how you'll work with them in an email send-out:

1. Create a new sendout, deciding which marketing groups you'll include.
2. Design your email (using the Design button).
3. Localize a variant for every marketing group you've included (use the Localization dropdown).
4. Choose the pool of contacts you'll send to (use the Recipients button).
5. Send or schedule the email (with the Send date and time button).

Changes to export of email statistics

As the Email Design Studio (the new email editor) allows individual email variants based on marketing groups, the data in email statistics exports will also change. Where you've previously had to identify a market through naming conventions in sendouts (such as "Newsletter_w16_Sweden"), now the marketing group of each variant will be shown in the statistics. Which means, depending on how you consume this data, that changes on your end might be necessary.

Article last reviewed 06 February 2026 16:09