Marketing groups let you send email variants to contacts in different countries and languages. In Manage marketing groups, you get an overview of both your draft and active marketing groups. This article explains how priority and status control which contacts end up in which group and when a group is used.
Priority
Because a contact could fit into several marketing groups, Customer Engagement uses a priority ranking to make sure each contact is assigned to only one marketing group.
If a contact doesn't fit the marketing group with priority 1, we check whether they fit the group with priority 2, and so on down the list. If a contact doesn't fit any other marketing group, they end up in the Default group.
It's good practice to set up your priorities with the most well-defined variations first (those including language rules), followed by your less-defined marketing groups (those without a language preference).
Priority 1 is the highest, priority 2 is the second highest, and so on.
How contacts are sorted into marketing groups
When you activate or update a marketing group, we scan all your contacts and sort them into the correct group. We also sort a contact when you add or update that contact. The process works like this:
- We compare each contact to the marketing group with the highest priority (priority 1), checking the contact's country and language preferences (if used) against the group's specifications. If the contact matches, we assign them to this marketing group and stop matching for that contact.
- If there's no match, we compare the contact to the marketing group with the second-highest priority, again comparing the contact's country and language to those of the group.
- This process continues through all marketing groups, in order of decreasing priority, until we can place the contact in a group.
- If we can't sort a contact into any of your marketing groups, we place them in the Default group, which is automatically given the lowest priority.
Learn more about how Customer Engagement chooses priority.
Status
A marketing group can have one of these statuses:
Draft
When you create a new marketing group, its status is Draft. In this status, you can configure the group's settings and create your draft emails without the group being populated with contacts or acted upon. We recommend keeping a group in Draft until you're ready to do your first sendout with it (that is, you've created your newsletters or other sendouts for this group).
Active
When you're ready to activate a marketing group, click the three dots (...) next to the status, then click Set as active. Once your group has the status Active, it's immediately available for new contacts to be matched to. We re-sort existing contacts into newly activated groups once every 24 hours, overnight.
Inactive
To delete an active marketing group, click the three dots (...) next to the status, then click Set as inactive. This deactivates and deletes the marketing group, and we redistribute all contacts in the group to other marketing groups.