AFFECTIONATE
SEGMENTATION
Matthew Vernhout believes a brand must exercise
a sense of balance when building and sustaining a
relationship with its community. One of the driving
tenets in community building is creating a positive
bond within the marketplace. That positiveness can be
achieved through having the right mix of personalization.
Too much personalization can seem like an invasion of
privacy and border on creepiness, while not enough and
the community is left feeling like the message is too
generic and not relevant.
Vernhout, VP of Deliverability for industry-leading
multichannel marketing technology company Netcore
Cloud, spends his days driving the company’s industrydefining
standards of email deliverability, privacy,
compliance and consulting practices. With nearly two
decades of experience, he understands the importance
of delivering messages that are relevant to the community you are trying to build. He knows that building that
affectionate segmentation matters.
“Personalized messages can be extremely simple or complex—each has advantages and drawbacks,” Vernhout says.
“Simple examples could be reformatting a message’s layout to showcase it better or creative ways to grab consumer
eyeballs. For a publisher, it could be as simple as placing it as the first story in your messages as part of the most read
section by that user (e.g., sports, business). An airline could collect the top five locations a recipient plans to travel to
and send weekly pricing and deals focused on that individual’s destination wish list or tailor a message to promote an
upcoming destination.”
In the end, the goal is simple: to become a reliable source for relevant information to the recipient and prove that your
messaging provides the best experience to the end user and
builds a relationship over time that makes your brand part of an
individual’s daily routine. As a marketer, Vernhout says some of
the best feedback is when your customer notices your messages
are missing from their inbox. “Whether it has been delayed, you
skipped a day or it failed to deliver, hearing your consumer ask,
‘Where’s my message?’ is a ringing endorsement of the trust
you’ve built with your consumers.”
In the highly competitive higher education landscape, building
a community of prospective and existing students means striking
milkshake 3
Building community with personalization
“PERSONALIZED MESSAGES
CAN BE EXTREMELY SIMPLE
OR COMPLEX—EACH
HAS ADVANTAGES AND
DRAWBACKS.”
— MATTHEW VERNHOUT,
VP/DELIVERABILITY, NETCORE CLOUD
February 2022