We all know the importance of personalisation in email marketing nowadays. People now expect email content to be personalised for them, and dynamic content is the key element behind this. Dynamic content is a powerful technique, allowing you to apply personalisation to your campaigns to help increase engagement with your content. There isn’t one way which is right for all of our customers, as alternative scenarios require different methods of dynamic content. But here is my quick take on the different options available to you.
Dynamic Content Rules
This type of dynamic content is most suitable where you have a small number of rules as they are manually set-up – more than a dozen and you will find it eats too much into your build time. The other area it is commonly used is where the same dynamic content is used across every email. For example perhaps you want to tailor a message in every email based upon their reward points status – write the rule and content once and it is done forever.
Simple Content Merging
Dynamic content rules are fine where there is a defined, small amount of variations but what if you have hundreds? A better way is to store each content variation in what we call a ‘snippet’ which is effectively a saved block of HTML and text. Then make sure the name of each snippet is the same as what data in the customers field and it can be merged in.
This is typically used for personalisation such as different content for each location, or perhaps different content for each of your local stores and saves having to write a rule for every variant, and then update these rules as you add and remove options. Content still has to be generated, but typically in this scenario this would be automatically created and updated for each variation.
Relational Data
The content merging is fine for where you have lots of groups of content. However, when you want to start personalising for each individual, relational data tables are your best bet. Rather than storing the ready made content in snippets, you store the data in tables. Popular examples would be orders, items ordered and products.
Combining these data sources, and adding a HTML layout allows you to merge in content unique to the individual such as recommended products for their next purchase. Due to the fact you are not storing fixed content, you can have many more templates for how you display your dynamic content.
Content Feeds
This is more about content automation than dynamic content but Maxemail provides the ability to pull in your social media and blog feeds to automatically create content for your email. For simple newsletters where you are reproducing items from the blog, this is a real timesaver.
So just how easy is it?
Applying Dynamic Content to your campaigns is easier than you think with the use of Maxemail’s Dynamic Content Component within the Email Builder. By using simple drag and drop functionality, this feature works brilliantly to easily group together segments of your mailing list based on data you have stored in profile fields against each recipient. By doing this you have the ability to target customers with relevant content that will be of interest to them through one single email, instead of building multiple emails for each criteria. For more information on applying dynamic content into your campaigns, talk to one of our experts today and find out how easy and effective it really is.
