Audience targeting — who sees which banner?

Not every banner has to be shown to everyone. Mailing an important customer? Then you probably want a different banner than when CCing a colleague. MailManagers has Smart recipient targeting — per-banner rules that decide whether the banner is shown based on the recipient's email address.

How does it work?

1. Open your banner via Banners → pick a banner.
2. In the sidebar, the 🎯 Audience section. By default it's Everyone (banner shows to all — normal behaviour).
3. Choose another mode:

- Only these domains — banner only shows to recipients whose domain matches - Not for these domains — banner shows to everyone except these domains

4. Add domains via the + button (one at a time, Enter also works).

What rules can you use?

• Plain domain: e.g. customer.com → also automatically matches shop.customer.com, support.customer.com, …
• external — special tag, matches any external domain (= not your own org)
• internal — special tag, matches only your own organisation

Examples

Sales banner only to externals

1. Mode: Only these domains
2. Add external
3. Result: you and your colleagues won't see this banner in internal mails, customers and prospects will.

Quick button: "External only (hide for my organisation)" does this in one click.

Customer-specific promo

1. Mode: Only these domains
2. Add customer.com (and optionally more)
3. Result: only when mailing someone@customer.com, they'll see this banner.

Disclaimer NOT for colleagues

1. Mode: Not for these domains
2. Add your own domain (e.g. mailmanagers.com) or use internal
3. Result: disclaimer shows to all external recipients, not to internal colleagues.

⚠ Important — targeting currently only works in Outlook

To decide whether to show the banner, we need to know who the recipient is at the moment the mail is being composed. Today only our Outlook add-in v2.x+ can do this — it reads the To field and passes the recipient address to our server with each banner call.

Mail clients without our add-in can't pass the recipient. In that case the system falls back to showing the banner to everyone (fail-open: better too many than too few).

Compatibility matrix

| Client | Targeting active? | What does the recipient see? | |---|---|---| | Outlook Desktop (Win/Mac) — with add-in | ✅ Yes | Banner shown per your rules | | Outlook Web — with add-in | ✅ Yes | Banner shown per your rules | | Outlook without our add-in | ❌ No | Banner shown to everyone | | Apple Mail (macOS / iOS) | ❌ No | Banner shown to everyone | | Gmail Web | ❌ No | Banner shown to everyone | | Gmail Mobile | ❌ No | Banner shown to everyone | | Other clients | ❌ No | Banner shown to everyone |

What does this mean in practice?

For most B2B customers this works well — Outlook is the dominant mail client in business contexts (~65-70% market share). For your most important use-cases (sales mails to external customers, disclaimers to partners) targeting reaches most of your audience.

For customers who mail a lot via Apple Mail or Gmail Web, targeting is more of a "best effort". The banner still appears — just without the domain filter.

What's coming?

We're working on a Gmail add-on that does the same recipient injection as the Outlook add-in. That brings coverage to ~85-90% of business mail. For Enterprise customers we're exploring a Microsoft Graph API integration that activates targeting tenant-wide, without per-user add-in.

Tips

• Subdomain auto-match: customer.com matches subdomains automatically. No need to add shop.customer.com separately.
• Region-specific disclaimer: create two banners — one for belgium.com, one for france.com. Both use "Only these domains".
• A/B test: set two banners with different include-rules → measure which scores better per segment.
• Privacy: the recipient address is only used to evaluate the rule. We don't log it, and don't keep it longer than the banner render call.

Common pitfalls

• "Banner shows to everyone even after targeting" — check that you have the Outlook add-in v2.x+ installed. Without the add-in, targeting won't work (fail-open).
• "@customer.com isn't recognised" — enter only the domain (customer.com), not the full address (info@customer.com). The @ sign is automatically stripped if you do type it.
• "How do I hide temporarily?" — use the Banner active toggle in the sidebar instead of a targeting rule.