Email marketers are usually required to create several variations of a single campaign to send to different audience segments.
For instance, a clothing brand would send different versions of their Black Friday sale to male and female audiences.
It becomes a highly tedious task to create such versions manually and send them to your target audience.
That’s where dynamic email content needs to make an entry. This way, you can send out customized email campaigns to your target audience based on their interests, site activity, etc.
This article will give you all the information about dynamic email content, how it works, and so on.
What Is Dynamic Email Content?
A dynamic email enables you to send personalized parts of the same email to different audience segments. These personalized parts change according to the data you have about your customers.
You can segment your target audience based on their age, location, and gender. You can also personalize sections such as text, visuals, and Calls-To-Action (CTAs) with dynamic email content.
For example, you’re sending a newsletter to all your subscribers, but you also want to mention a special event in Paris. As people in other countries won’t be able to attend the event, you can personalize your CTA, text, or an image that appears in the email for Parisians only. Hence, they’ll be able to read about your event while others would not.
3 Benefits of Using Dynamic Email Content
Dynamic email content specifically tailors your message, so your contacts can see exactly what you want them to see.
With more relevant content, you can improve your email marketing strategy to generate greater revenue. So, here are three advantages of dynamic email content:
1. Improves customer experience
If you want to cater to every single customer of yours, dynamic email content is the answer. It lets you customize your emails to reflect a subscriber’s geographical location, purchasing history, and interests.
2. Saves your time
There’s no need to create separate campaigns for different audience groups because dynamic email content assists you in crafting customized experiences within no time.
All you have to do is develop one email and switch its content based on the particular segment. This sort of automation saves your precious time to concentrate on email strategy instead of repetitive tasks.
3. Boosts customer engagement
Subscribers always want to interact with content that speaks directly to them. By delivering relevant content to your customers’ inboxes, you’re more likely to boost click-through rates and prompt them to take action.
The higher the customer engagement, the longer you’ll be able to retain them and sell your products.
3 Ways to Personalize Your Dynamic Email Content
You must take steps to personalize emails to make them dynamic. Here are three ways you can do this.
1. Text
It’s easier to send personalized emails with dynamic content, and you can begin with adjusting your text to target specific subscribers. Here are the parts you can customize:
Subject lines
Headers
Email footer
You can draw your subscribers’ attention by adding merge tags. It allows you to add unique user data from your mailing list into emails in plenty of ways like:
Inserting the first name of a customer into your email. Believe it or not, your subscribers will drop dead in their tracks when they see their name because it makes them feel like you’re talking directly to them.
Customizing your emails with info from a survey, quiz, customer feedback, etc.
2. Visuals
An email packed with text only won’t do much to hold someone’s attention. Hence, adding visuals can improve your email campaigns. Your emails must have images, videos, or GIFs that reflect your customers’ interests.
Dynamic email content lets you incorporate visuals relevant to specific subscriber groups. For example, you want to include a meme in your email, but only millennials will understand the reference. So, make sure only this age group sees the meme.
3. Calls-To-Action (CTAs)
CTAs are an effective way to motivate your email recipients to take action. According to a study, emails with a single CTA increased clicks by 371%. Therefore, your emails just can’t go without them.
You can improve your CTAs even more by using dynamic email content. It enables you to customize your CTA’s text, color, and placement to better match the needs of your audience.
For instance, a travel agency sends birthday emails to its valued customers. Along with personalizing the email’s copy, they customize the CTA’s link, so each customer is redirected to the landing pages of countries they like exploring.
How Does Dynamic Email Content Work?
Subscribers crave a highly personalized experience. So, it’s high time you up your game and craft dynamic email messages. But first, you must know what to do for dynamic emails to work.
Step 1: Collect customer data
You need access to customer data to personalize your email marketing with dynamic email content. Here are four ways to collect customer data more efficiently.
1. Customer interviews
Interviews are one of the best methods to collect customer data. You can speak directly to your customers about the results they’d want from using your product or service.
2. Customer feedback
Similarly, give your customers the opportunity to interact with you through surveys, quizzes, and website live chat and collect useful information to make your content dynamic.
3. Community research
Assemble review data from major platforms and look up important keywords. For instance, using Google Analytics to keep track of all the content that received views and shares. This way, you obtain useful insights that you can use to improve your email marketing campaigns.
4. Subscriber preferences
Ask your customers to select the type of content they’d want to receive from you by giving them an option to express their preferences when signing up for your email newsletters.
Or you can simply add a link to manage preferences in your email footers.
Step 2: Employ segmentation
Dividing subscribers with similar characteristics and interests into groups plays a key role in personalizing your dynamic email content. By employing segmentation, you can increase your email engagement.
You can leverage the customer data to determine the right group for your recipients. This ensures that the emails you’re sending are relevant to them.
Here are a few ways to segment your audience:
1. Demographics
Using basic demographics for customer segmentation is one of the easiest ways out there. You can consider several demographics like age, gender, location, educational level, marital status, profession, etc., for that purpose.
2. Psychographics
Psychographics target potential customers based on their beliefs, values, and interests. Depending on your product or service, you can segment your audience on the basis of their hobbies, food choices, or political views.
3. Behavioral data
Specific patterns made by a customer’s actual actions are what make up the behavioral data. These specific patterns are your subscriber’s past purchasing history, website activity, or email engagement.
Therefore, understanding customer behavior is an opportunity to create better emails and reinforce that you care about your customers.
Step 3: Customize your message for each segment
After customer segmentation, the next step is determining how you will customize your emails. There are plenty of ways to do that, like adding your customer’s name to the email greeting or tailoring the overall email for a specific person.
For example, if you’re a clothing brand, you can send product recommendations to your customers based on the items they have purchased from you previously.
Providing customized messages to each segment makes them feel like they are an important part of your brand, which in turn creates brand loyalty and long-term relationships with your customers.
Mistakes to Avoid When Using Dynamic Email Content
Implementing dynamic email content is a big mistake without a clear-cut strategy. Thus, it’s always best to define the baseline rules beforehand. Below are a few common mistakes to avoid:
Using inaccurate data
Access to complete information about your customers is no good if your data is inaccurate. Your team should ensure that all the data you have about your subscribers is valid, correct, and up-to-date.
You can also ask your subscribers to update their email preferences to improve your email strategy.
Overusing multiple dynamic content types at once
With so many benefits of dynamic email content, you’ll be urged to try every feature simultaneously. You’d want to change multiple content blocks in your email. However, you must resist this temptation and focus only on the content that requires personalization based on customer segmentation.
So, it is highly recommended to change only one or two content blocks per email.
Failing to track metrics
You must track the metrics of your email campaigns to analyze the progress of dynamic email content. These metrics include click-through rates, conversion rates, etc. This way, you can get a better understanding of what your subscribers' preferences and interests are.
3 Examples of Real-Life Dynamic Email Content
Dynamic email content is known for creating a unique experience for your customers. Below are a few examples from different brands to take note of.
1. Timberland
Timberland does a great job by sending dynamic email content according to its subscribers’ occupation. The above email displays work boots that can endure different weather conditions, making them perfect for construction and manufacturing workers.
2. Netflix
Netflix is the king of personalization. The company collects user data to provide customers with the best possible experience. It leverages dynamic blocks to send an email that addresses its customers by name and suggests them what to watch next. This way, they get the feeling that Netflix knows them.
3. Airbnb
Another use of dynamic email content comes from Airbnb. The above email provides personalized recommendations based on the information from their user’s profile (in this case, their location).
This is exactly the sort of data that is useful and relevant to a subscriber, making them more likely to convert.
Final Thoughts
Using dynamic email content is the next big thing in email marketing, and there’s no chance it’s dying down anytime soon.
Even with just a little information about your subscribers, you can send them relevant content, improving your email engagement.
