Continuing on from our post last week around personalising your email campaigns, I thought I would expand on this. This week we explore dynamic content as a way to enhance your campaigns, increasing the relevance and personalisation, by tailoring the content to specific recipients using dynamic content.
What is Dynamic content?
It is an element within an email campaign that changes from one subscriber to another depending on the data you have for them in your database.
In other words, it’s the perfect way to customise your email, improve the relevance of your content, and better meet your recipient’s individual needs. And it starts with knowing your recipients’ preferences.
In our Top Tips post we introduced preference centers. They are a handy but often under utilised tool, that allows your recipients to update their own contact details, quickly and easily. This means you’ll obtain their correct email address, know which of your emails they want to receive, and what their individual preferences are in terms of content, frequency etc.
Once you have your preference centre up and running, and your subscribers’ details are all up to date, you can really start tailoring your campaigns to better suit each individual. So you can make sure its toys for Molly and tools for Ben and not the other way round!
So how do you set this up? What’s involved?
Well, dynamic content essentially comprises of two key parts:
- Dynamic content blocks
- Dynamic content rules
The first step is to create the different blocks of content that will swap out within your email. These blocks are called Dynamic Content Blocks. This is where you would create dynamic content block 1, named ‘Tools’, and dynamic content block 2, named ‘Toys’.
Once you have created the different blocks and filled them with juicy content, the next step is to create and manage the rules that will pull the content into your email.
Once you’ve set up these rules, and put the dynamic content links into your email, the best way to test this and see that the right dynamic content is pulling through for the right people is to test. If you’re using the SmartMail PRO platform, we recommend you use the ‘Live Test’ function, which allows you to send a mock live send using your real data, but to yourself, not the recipient, so you can cross check your data against what is pulling through in the email to ensure that Ben is getting tools and not toys.
If you would like to talk more about what dynamic content can do for you, contact us at support@smartmailpro.comfor some expert advice.