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Dynamic content is about tailoring sections of your email content for each recipient. The benefits are it increases the relevance of each email and can save valuable time in the production process.
Dynamic content should be more than just adding in relevant product offers and news – there are many other ways you can tailor your email.
Insert a custom salutation
One of the simplest ways of using dynamic content is to fill in the gaps in your database. You may want to use a personalised introduction such as “Dear Firstname”. However some of your email addresses may not have a first name recorded against them so if you simply merge in a field these recipients will see “Dear ” rather than “Dear Bob”.
Using a dynamic rules we can replace the blank space with a word such as “Customer” or “Reader”. Here is how the rule would work:
If First name = BLANK then insert “Customer”
Else
Insert [first name]
Within Maxemail it is easy to set-up and test this rule and store it as a template so it can be used again and again.
Change the ‘From’ name
We have previously talked about how choosing the right ‘From’ name can have a massive impact on the open rate of an email. A personal name often works better but the ultimate is to include the contact name of the recipients account manager if applicable.
Corporate Direct, a B2B supplier of telecoms equipment did this recently and found open rates increased by 70% by dynamically merging the address in.
Only display topics the recipient has expressed an interest in
Newsletters can have a diverse range of topics in and many people will only be interested in certain topics. To avoid them getting fed up of wading through irrelevant news items you can define rules that will only include content based upon their stated preferences.
Target offers based upon demographic information
On occasions you do not get given any preferences on content within the email you can still make decisions on what content should be included for each recipient based upon other information you know about them including:
- Where do they live
- How old they are
- Are they male or female
Recently Emailcenter set-up a series of automated emails for restaurant booking site toptable.co.uk. They have 1500 different locations in the UK and wanted a way of being able to supply everyone with localised content rather than a generic London newsletter.
How we achieved the set-up of all these versions is for another day but the key learning is from looking at the performance of these emails. Booking rates trebled in certain locations due to the fact that the recipient gained a series of offers that were relevant to them.
Vary the branding in the message
With modern web technology numerous businesses operate off whitelabelled websites where the underlying technology is the same but numerous organisations utilise it with their own branding. Targeting all of these people would require different messages which is time consuming to do – a better approach would be to tailor the branding in the message depending on what site they submitted their details on.
IG Index, the financial markets spread betting company send a series of daily emails containing the same content appearing to be from different brands and international sites. Rather than create different emails for each brand a simple rule inserts the correct branding and language for each email.
Tailor straplines and call-to-actions
In addition to changing product information or the news topics displayed your call-to-actions could also vary. Another set of dynamic rules we run for toptable inserts a tailored message according to how many reward points they have. So for example if the person does not have any reward points they get a message telling them to find out about reward points while those with reward points get messages saying how many more meals they need to book in order to qualify for a free meal.
Utilise past email behaviour to adapt content
Based upon how your recipients have acted upon your messages can be an effective means of defining the personalisation used in further emails.
For example:
- If the person has not opened any of the last few emails try a different subject line
- Insert a special incentive at the top of the email if they have not clicked through previously
- If they have clicked on a particular link send them more information based upon that product
Of course all of these ideas take thought and time to put into place. In order to implement these ideas into your email campaigns consider this checklist:
- lan what areas of your email you wish to tailor to get an understanding of what data and new content you will need
- Identify that you can get the required data for each recipient
- Find a technology solution or partner that will make the implementation of dynamic content easy
- Ensure that you have the ability to run pre-send checks on each version of your message easily
- Content development is a resource hungry activity so talk with your IT team and email partner to see how you can automate content generation. For example many Emailcenter clients use existing RSS and XML data to automatically populate their email
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