Dynamic content is merging information or products into email marketing campaigns based on customers' specific individual attributes. Thus, you are sending targeted email messages to your customers in one email campaign, one send, and one piece of HTML content.

The key is to set this up so it can be easily repeated for every email campaign, because sending targeted email will increase response rates to and revenue generated by email marketing.

Dynamic Content: Member Attributes 
 

• Demographics - age, gender, location:
  These are the demographics that a customer selects during the welcome program. Age / gender / nearest store (based on zip code) for example.


• Preferences - products, services, professional, personal:
  These are the preferences that a customer selects during the welcome program or profile update. They can be product category, what service you offer, what brands you sell and so on. Preferences give you the most information about customers' interests. If they select that they're interested in trainers, then you should send them email alerts about new trainers that are in stock.  


• Purchase information - previous purchases:
  You can use a customer’s previous purchase information to build conditional content rules.


• Web analytics - where, when and how often:
  Analytical data about your email customers' website behavior can also be used to build dynamic content rules. This is the where, what and how a customer navigates your website and visits specific pages on the website. Dynamically conditioning the cart abandonment email to display what products a customer had in their cart, for example.

Dynamic Content: Types of Delivery

• Email Newsletters:
  This is the standard e-newsletter that you send out. This can be set up so the portion of your database for which you have attribute information receives an email specific to their interests, while the rest of your email list receives a standard message.


• Email alerts and updates:
  Out of stock, cart abandonment, and trigger email messages can all have dynamic content based on customer attributes. You can also have specific stock alerts such as, "New items available in your select brand Nike". See a couple of examples here:

• Mobile and Social media:
  Using member attributes to "push" updates about services and products via mobile and social media apps should be part of any online marketing campaign. You can apply conditions specific to a customer in email marketing, so why not push the same information via Facebook or Twitter? (I will talk more about this in a future blog post)

How to Set Up Dynamic Content

Structurally here is how you do it:

What we’re doing here is matching up preferences from email sign-up with products that we have in stock today. We’re also using past purchase history to define what dynamic content our recipients will receive.

Typically you integrate purchase history nightly with a CSV file from a secure FTP location. That way there are many more matches for the product in the product upload - the business rules can match the products either with a preference or with past purchase history for that designer or category.

In summary you can set up a dynamic content email campaign based on different bits of information you know about your customers. Doing this will enable timely, targeted and relevant email messages AND increase your email response rates.

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