Tailoring your content according to what you know about subscribers can boost response. Here’s what you need to know…

What’s the difference between dynamic content and personalisation?

The difference lies in how the email is built. Personalisation inserts data that is held in your database directly into the content of your email. Dynamic content, on the other hand, is where blocks of tailored content hosted by you or your ESP are inserted according to specific rules set by you.

Give me some examples

For a personalised campaign, you might include details such as your subscriber’s name, address, date of birth – any data that you hold, in the format in which it’s stored – so long as it’s relevant or adds value to your message.

Using dynamic content, meanwhile, you might opt to send different content elements to different subscriber groups that meet certain criteria such as:

• interests: a DIY store might send one content element to customers who browsed garden  furniture, and something different to those that browsed soft furnishings
• geography an international campaign might send content in different languages to users in different countries
• gender you might send one image to males, and a different image to females
• customer type for instance, sending high-value offers to big spenders and lower-value deals to lower-spending customers

Personalisation? Don’t people see through that “Dear <First Name>” stuff nowadays?

It’s true that simply personalising a message with a user’s name doesn’t have the impact it once did. Any message that just tops a completely generic message with a user name is likely to disappoint, and consumers are wary of supposedly personalised messages that turn out to be spam.

However, with a little lateral thinking, there are lots of easy ways to use personalisation to improve campaign performance such as:

• add credibility to welcome messages by including the source of the registration you’re confirming or
• include the Account Manager’s name or signature in B2B campaigns.

Better still, many platforms also enable you to set up dynamic personalisation – enabling you to build rules around personalisation. This gives you some of the advantages of dynamic content without the complexity, such as a rule like: “if ‘first name’ blank, use ‘customer’”.

Isn’t creating dynamic content very complicated?

If you haven’t created dynamic campaigns before, your first campaign can seem complicated, but the effort is well worth it: dynamic campaigns can save you significant amounts of time and resource in the long run.

Once you have your rules set up, you can often save them for future use, making ongoing dynamic campaigns only slightly more time consuming to set up and test.

To get you started, follow these steps:

• Create a test list with internal contacts or seed addresses with data that mirrors the data you hold for your subscribers. Then have a play with your platform.
• Start off simply with live data. Use just one dynamic content segment and a couple of rules, then you can build on your campaign’s complexity from there.
• Consider outsourcing the set-up and deployment of dynamic campaigns, so freeing you up to spend more time on generating content and strategies for future campaigns.

Checklist for developing campaigns with tailored content

Personalisation and dynamic content can provide a significant uplift to your campaign performance when done well; get it wrong, however, and you can harm your brand and reputation. Here’s what you need to get right:

• Check the quality of your data – are all fields complete and accurate?
• Make sure you’ve thought through the logic properly, and specify default values where appropriate.
• Test your campaigns thoroughly. With some ESPs you can test before deployment using live data; otherwise, create some dummy data and generate a test mailing to that list before your final deployment.
• Check your hosted version: whether personalisation or dynamic content carry through to your hosted version will depend on your platform.
• Find out what reporting is available for dynamic/personalised campaigns. Even if your platform cannot report on the performance of different content segments, you should still be able to run reports offline, though this will incur additional time and resource.
• Don’t personalise for the sake of it: only include information that is relevant and valuable to subscribers
• Always test the performance of your personalised campaigns against less targeted campaigns: sometimes broad offerings will generate unexpected sales, after all the fact a customer is male does not preclude them from buying a dress for a friend, relation or even for themselves.

About the Author

Dela Quist is CEO at Alchemy Worx Ltd. View the full bio here.

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