Email groups
Email groups allow you to configure default settings for similar emails, including default headers, footers, and subscription management options. If you regularly send brochures and event emails, each of these types of messages can have their own default settings. This makes design and deployment easier for your organization.
Using email groups (and group defaults) is an easy way to ensure visual and contextual consistency. This can be especially valuable when you routinely deploy messages to a set segment, like subscribers to a monthly newsletter. Consistent visual signifiers like branding images in an email header, and agent information in the footer, can help foster familiarity among a base audience. Moreover, keeping subscription options readily available helps to develop a sense of transparency and trust within these communications.
As a part of the subscription management functionality built into Eloqua, you are not able to send an email before associating it with an email group. Having an email group defined for each email makes it easier to manage and provide customized unsubscribe options instead of simply defaulting to the global unsubscribe list.
Tip: For the latest best practices on subscription management, review our post on Topliners.
Examples of using email groups
Administrators can create email group defaults for various group types. It's important to consider not only the type of email included in that group, but also the target audience; there should be some shared relevance between the recipients to ensure an optimized experience. Here are a few suggested group types:
- By marketing asset type: One of the more common setups is to organize email groups by the type and instance of the marketing asset. For example, you may have different email groups for different newsletters, notifications, PRs, emergency bulletins, and so on.
- By department: You can group the emails by the department from which they are sent. This is particularly useful if you have several different departments sending different types of emails to contacts. For larger companies, the top-level categories might be by department, with functional groupings within each department area.
- By campaign: You could separate your emails into different campaign email groups. This will make it easier for you to isolate the responses to each campaign. Again, this structure could be within a department structure if more than one department (for instance: Marketing, Sales, Support) is distributing email to recipients.
- By event: In some cases, particularly for larger events (such as trade shows), you may want to have an email group for each event. In other instances, it may make more sense to organize by the type of event, such as seminars, trade shows, and webinars.
- By user or agent: In a really large operation, you may want to allow individual marketers or sales personnel to run their own email groups.
- By industry: If you are addressing multiple industry verticals, it may make sense to organize email groups by different industries.
- By product or service: If you have a large catalog of products and/or services, you may want to organize email groups by the different types of products.
- For Engage users: Email groups can be created to share email templates with Engage users.
Next steps
Managing contact subscription pages
Customizing email group permissions