Dynamic content can be used in a variety of different ways to help personalize messages to your customers based on information they’ve provided to you. Knowing your customers’ interests and behaviors allows you to leverage dynamic content in some really cool ways. The end goal is to increase your open rates, click through rates and ultimately conversions/sales. For our purposes in this guide, we’ll be using a local produce store email signup list as our example.
Company: Fungi Local Produce Co.
Customers: John Doe – Age: 25 – Favorite Food: Ice Cream AND Jane Sampleton – Age: 33 – Favorite Food: Pineapple
Newsletter Goal: Increase sales by 20% in the next week by offering current customers an incentive to come into the store.
Email Version 1: Generic/Unspecified
Unless you require users to fill out all fields when signing up for your email list, you will likely have people who intentionally or unintentionally leave out information. In our example of the produce store, it’s possible that the newsletter signup is just a sheet of paper where you put your email address, which is then manually entered into the database. Regardless, you should always plan to have a backup version with defaults for each field (including name). The example to the right shows our store’s generic eblast subject line, text, discount and image. Expect this version of the email to get lower open and click thru rates as the information is not as specific to the end user.
Email Version 2: Ice Cream
Our next email is for all our ice cream lovers including John. Note which elements have changed from our generic email:
- Subject Line: Name changed from ‘Valued Customer’ to ‘John’ and ‘Storewide Discount’ changed to ‘Discounts On Ice Cream!’
- Body: ‘Dear Valued Customer’ changed to ‘Dear John’. Generic ‘our food’ and ‘10% off’ changed to ‘ice cream’ and ‘50% off any ice cream available’.
- Image: Changed to picture of a vanilla ice cream cone.
Email Version 3: Pineapple
Finally we have our email for Jane and all other customers whose favorite food at Fungi Local Produce Co is pineapple. Keep in mind that dynamic content can be based on behaviors as well as user preferences too. Over time, you may begin to notice that one subset of users tends to click on your email’s Facebook link a lot while an other set clicks to visit your blog. From there you can set rules that target those users with messages they are more likely to read. For the Facebook users, send out a special promotion for all Facebook followers and for your blog users, add them to a list that receives a new email every time you post an article to your blog. The possibilities with dynamic content and marketing automation are endless when you do a good job with data collection and analysis.