Segment by address domain?

When we talk of segmenting email addresses, what we're really doing (and rightly so) is segmenting the individuals behind those addresses into groups of people with shared characteristics.

But how about really segmenting the actual email addresses? Grouping together those sharing a common domain, such as gmail.com or creating a separate segment for any of the top four webmail address providers.

How might that help? Here some food for thought:

Spot delivery problems

The numbers you usually see in a campaign report can mask problems at one particular domain. Consider these basic results for a newsletter send:



The total results suggest nothing unusual is happening: an open rate of 18% and a CTR of 20%.

If you look at the results by domain segment, then you see you have an issue at Gmail. Now you can take corrective action for a problem that would otherwise remain invisible.

Interfaces and design

Each of the main webmail services has its own unique interface for displaying emails and its own unique way of interpreting the code in HTML emails. For example:

• Yahoo! Mail has a preview pane, but Gmail does not.
• Windows Live Hotmail does not display alt attributes (so you can't rely on them to compensate for when images don't display). Yahoo! Mail does.
• Gmail's support for CSS in far weaker than that offered by Yahoo! Mail or Windows Live Hotmail.

[For more info on the display idiosyncrasies of each service, see the Email Standards Project website.]

If you understand the nuances of each service, might you make use of that knowledge in your emails?

We know, for example, that Gmail displays contextual advertising next to emails. Can you word your messages to Gmail users to trigger your own ads (should you?) or to prevent competitor ads from showing up?

Custom "whitelisting" instructions

You perhaps use the welcome email to urge people to add the sender to an address book, so that emails that reach the end user go to the inbox and not into the spam or junk folder.

Most such messages are generic in nature, simply drawing attention to the issue or directing people to a website with multiple sets of instructions for various email clients and webmail services.

Segmenting by domain allows you to send specific instructions to the recipient. So Gmail users get info on how to whitelist an address in Gmail.

For more on "dynamic whitelisting" read this recent post by Reagan Taylor.

Could you try something similar with image blocking? Can your alt tags contain domain-specific copy encouraging people to activate images?

Response differences

Online retailers often report different conversion rates, depending on which search engine the customer used to reach the website. Each search engine attracts a different demographic. Might the same apply to email address providers?

The evidence suggests the answer is yes. In 2007, Hitwise reported, for example, that Gmail users were "much more likely to be young, high income, and in the early adopter segments."

Can you exploit that understanding in your emails? (I'm doubtful: click data and other segmenting info is likely more valuable for customizing offers and content.)

Other issues

While all the above sounds promising, there are a few ifs and buts...

1. Designing different emails for different domains is extra work. Is it, for example, more cost-efficient simply to have a universal "safe" design template that displays adequately everywhere?

2. It might seem self-evident that an @gmail.com address is viewed in the Gmail interface, but it's not always true. Many of the top webmail services allow automatic forwarding to another email address or let users retrieve email into their desktop client.

So while most addresses are viewed in the expected venue, this won't always be the case. Not to mention that different browsers (think mobile devices) will display website content differently anyway.

3. Customizing for a recipient domain can never be perfect as the end user has an influence over interface layout and display settings.

Yahoo! Mail users, for example, can adjust the size of the preview pane. Windows Live Hotmail users can toggle the preview on and off or decide whether it should appear below or to the right of the inbox window.

As always, you would need to test to see if domain segmentation has any value for you.

Thoughts?

More tactics | Tags: email segmentation, gmail, yahoo mail, windows live hotmail

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