How to Use Dynamic Content in Your Email Marketing to Drive More Opens and Clicks
How to Use Dynamic Content in Your Email Marketing to Drive More Opens and Clicks
How do you get more prospects and customers to open and click your emails? Make sure that your emails are relevant, personal, and expected (i.e., recipients have actually asked to receive them). Check out a ton of ideas for leveraging dynamic content to optimize the relevant and personal aspects of your email marketing.
What Is Dynamic Content and Why Use It?
Dynamic content is any type of content in an email that automatically adjusts based on set criteria in your database, including demographics, preferences, subscriber behaviors, and time and location. So, by using dynamic content, you can customize a single email send to provide subscribers with an individualized experience and one-to-one communication based on their preferences, needs, and behaviors.
If you use dynamic content to help make your emails more relevant and personal — rather than simply blasting out the same email message to all subscribers on your list — you’ll find that your email engagement (e.g., opens and clicks) will increase. In addition, higher subscriber engagement will help improve your email deliverability. And with high email engagement and deliverability, you can increase the frequency of your email sends, which often drives up revenue.
The following are a few statistics that indicate how much of an impact creating and sending relevant content and personalized emails can have on your email-marketing results:
- Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened
- Segmented campaigns increase email revenue by 760%
- 80% of consumers who read promotional emails said that it was helpful when brands recommended purchases based on their purchase history
- 77% of online shoppers who have opted in to receive promotional emails from a company said that they were more likely to make a purchase if the email messages featured products based on their preferences and previous purchases
- 82% of consumers said that they would likely purchase more items from a company if the emails that they received were more personalized.
How to Leverage Dynamic Content in Your Email Campaigns
Dynamic content can be so much more impactful when marketers go beyond just throwing in a “Dear <first name>” at the top of an email campaign. Here are some examples of how to make your emails more relevant and personal by leveraging dynamic content:
- Switch out images in promotional email campaigns based on criteria such as age and gender of different subscriber segments
- Create urgency and build excitement by using dynamic images, such as clocks or timers that count down until a sale or event begins
- Include information in your abandoned-cart email campaigns about the specific item(s) that prospects and customers left in their online shopping carts
- Adjust blocks of copy in an email message based on where a subscriber is in your sales funnel (e.g., you likely wouldn’t say exactly the same thing to a new prospect who hasn’t purchased from you as opposed to a loyal customer)
- Provide information about a store branch’s hours and events based on subscribers’ locations
- Provide product recommendations based on an individual’s previous purchases or website browsing behavior in such transactional emails as delivery confirmations and receipts
- Promote certain products based on the regional weather forecast of subscribers (e.g., advertise sales on snow blowers in advance of a possible snowstorm or on water ice when it’s going to be especially hot)
- Include information on special promotions and sales based on product categories of customers’ previous purchases and website browsing behavior
- Send personalized birthday emails
- Provide live maps and weather forecasts for an upcoming event based on subscriber location
- Include individual membership rewards-program updates in promotional emails.
Leverage Dynamic Content Plus Predictive Analytics to Drive Even Better Email Performance Results
Beyond some of these relatively quick and easy dynamic content tactics, you can really kick it up a notch with predictive analytics and historical sales data to create dynamic content with the potential to have a significant positive impact on your bottom line.
Let’s start with historical sales. If you know a customer has purchased a specific product in the last 10 days, you can use predictive analytics to determine what products he or she would be interested in purchasing in the future based on data collected from other customers who purchased the same item. Then, leverage that information to make product recommendations via dynamic content blocks in a follow-up promotional email campaign. For example, you could say:
“Thanks so much for your recent order of your Kate Spade purse. We hope you’re loving it! We wanted you to be the first to see a couple of our newest products that other customers also love.”
And include images and information about the products in which you think this group of customers would be interested.
You can even take this type of promotion a step further by making the copy driven by customer-based data that you have (e.g., age, gender, amount spent with your company). If you know that the propensity of a segment of customers purchasing a second product after purchasing a first product is 20%, for instance, use dynamic content to promote that second product to those customers. This could have a huge impact on driving additional sales. And based on our experience, if customers have purchased two products in the last 30 days, their likelihood of purchasing a third product is even more substantial. So, sending relevant and personalized emails that leverage dynamic content and predictive marketing to this group of customers has an even better chance of driving more sales and the lifetime value of your customers.
Check out the following articles for more information about leveraging predictive analytics and email-marketing tools for driving sales, including dynamic content tools:
- “Using Predictive Analytics in Email Marketing”
- “9 Top Predictive Analytics Platforms for Email-Marketing Success”
- “21 of the Newest, Coolest Email-Marketing Tools for Driving Sales”
Personalized and targeted content drives more opens, clicks, conversions, and revenue from your email campaigns. How can you best leverage dynamic content to get the most out of your email-marketing campaigns? Contact FulcrumTech today and we’ll show you how it’s done!