Using any form of dynamic content in your email campaigns is sure to drive interest – and most likely more revenue. Using what you know about your customers and their behavior, you can create an email that is unique to each person in your email list.
Dynamic content starts with the pieces of information you have on each of customers, then incorporating that into different parts of your email. Depending on your business model, you may have anything from zip codes to birthdays to detailed purchase histories available. But even the simplest information will set the groundwork for developing a strong, personalized email campaign.
Personalized Subject Lines
One of the easiest ways to personalize your emails is by integrating the customer’s name or other identifying factor into the subject line. Doing this can be considered spammy from both the customer and ISP’s viewpoint, so take the time to design your strategy properly. Using a customer’s name in the subject line is best applied when the email is meant to be directly for them, instead of a mass marketing communication. Order confirmations, abandoned carts and welcome emails are all examples where the personalization in the subject line is acceptable and even quite welcomed. The personalization in these cases can really provide the customer with what they think is a unique interaction with your company and enhances their experience with your brand.
One important thing to keep in mind if you are using personalization in your subject line is to assign a default value should the dynamic information be unavailable or missing. If you don’t require some fields – such as first name – at the time of sign up, you might have some null fields in your database that can affect personalization. At the time of sending the email, your ESP will read the dynamic code and insert the required field. If nothing is there, then you will be left with a subject line with that is missing a word and doesn’t make sense. The default value will populate the dynamic portion should the field be null, thus saving the day.
Another aspect to keep in mind is the formatting of the dynamic field. Customers will fill out your form using any number of upper and lowercase letters. This can result in the personalized field being inserted in all capital letters or all lowercase letters, making your email template look odd and unprofessional. Although it can be time consuming and requires IT resources, have your database normalize the information the fields you will be using. In the case of a first name, you might choose to normalize all data to have a capitalized first letter and all others lowercase. In another case, you might like an order number to be all capitals. Whatever you choose, the end result will make your emails look much more professional, so a normalization project is definitely worth the investment.
Dynamic Content
Once you’ve mastered using personalization in the subject line of your email, expand the dynamic content into your email template. Take what you know about your customers and translate it into a portion of your email that can be made to specifically target individuals. Just about any portion of your email can be dynamic – from pictures to copy to headers and footers.
If you experience deliverability issues, one quick and easy way to use dynamic content to help with this is having whitelist instructions in a message header. Start by creating a block of text for each of the ISPs that compose your email list. In each, explain how to add your email address to their contacts in the ISP. Then, dynamically insert the instructions into your email – the header space above the content is pretty common – based on the domain of the email address. This should give your customers specific instructions that are targeted to them, that they’ll hopefully follow. As always, remember to have default instructions set up in the case that an ISP isn’t recognized.
If your business model revolves around sales or orders, use your customers’ purchase histories to focus or feature items that they have purchased in the past. Choose a portion of your email that you want to dynamically insert – perhaps the main image – and create a few different images that you can rotate into that space. Then, segment your email list into groups that would qualify for each version.
It’s possible that not everyone in your email list will qualify for the segments you’ve chosen to target for the dynamic content. In this case, you can either: 1) choose not to send the remaining customers an email, 2) send the remaining customers a generic version of the email with no dynamic content or 3) send the remaining customers the most popular version of the email with dynamic content. To help you decide, you might try creating a correlated selling report. In this report, graph on one axis the products that your customers have last purchased. Then, on the other axis, graph what products the customers had purchased in the transaction prior to the last. Having a chart such as this can be incredibly helpful in determining what dynamic content will work best with your email list.
Purchase history doesn’t have to be the only thing that your dynamic content is based on. Be creative with what information you have and use it to infer things about your customers. Zip codes can be used to segment your list on warm vs. cold climates and dynamically insert images of beach and mountain vacations. Use gender to segment your list and dynamically feature male and female lifestyle images. If you don’t have age, you can even try using the domain of the email address, where Gmail users tend to be younger and AOL and Hotmail users skew older. Then use this to create an email that features prom vs. club dresses.
In the end, dynamic content can be used in millions of different scenarios. It’s up to you as a marketer to take what information you have and use it to create very targeted and relevant emails for your each of your customers.
