Personalizing Emails based on Audience Using Dynamic Content

Creating a Personal Connection with Your Audience

Understanding the intentions of your audience and what materials capture their interest is a critical goal of modern marketers. Grasping what truly engages them is the bedrock of growing organic relationships and brand loyalty. That is why users of Oracle Eloqua must go far beyond simply including client’s names, companies, or cities via field merging. True organic connection begins with personalization.

Personalization should be your go to tactic to demonstrate that you fully understand and care about why your audience engages your brand. It enables you to show that you hear what matters to them. Leveraging what you know about your contacts, ensures messaging delivers communications and content that resonates. It treats your communications like a personal conversation with a vested interest while meeting the varied needs of your multiple audiences at scale. Therefore, dynamic content is a key resource to ensure Eloqua users meet these lofty engagement goals.

What is Dynamic Content?

In 1969, before Sesame Street began, they ran countless studies to see what kept the attention of their audience the longest. They based the entire show around the results of the studies to game-changing effect. This is the essence of dynamic content. It can filter out what audiences show no interest in and keep content that customers are likely to engage with – providing content based on audience preferences. The users are put in different groupings known as segments in accordance with their interests.

In more technical terms, dynamic content is a set of rules governing contact, account, or custom object data based on logic. It determines what content a specific contact, or group of contacts in an account receives in an email or on a landing page. A well architected dynamic approach culminates with new first party insights, that support, or even uncover key criteria for a particular segments' movement within the lifecycle.

Further refinement of segment attributes and interests helps us understand what attributes truly correlate to online behaviors, and offers clarity in identifying what specific content most successfully drives desired offline actions. The path forward on engagement from the accounts and contacts in the campaign becomes more easily understood and underpinned by data collected from customers.

These insights are derived throughout the campaign from your specific audience segment’s engagement. It allows the marketer to strategically position dynamic content that we know customers are interested in.

Dynamic Content in Action

An Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) client wants to grow a particular product's performance among three Enterprise Channel Partners.
As a part of their overall communication strategy, they plan to leverage product related digital resources by including these channel partners in campaign sequences of feature & benefit content, and using the following unique communications:

• Partner Portal Survey Link
• Call to Sign up for Certification Training & Exam

Using Dynamic content, the OEM can improve efficiencies, insights into their partners behaviors, and stronger cost control. Furthermore, a single send, split with dynamic content including the three companies receiving surveys, makes a personalized survey URL appear for the right company, enables a deeper comparison of response, and a greater opportunity for insights into the partner relationship holistically.

In addition to broader understanding, dynamic content enables cost control when it is used to attach offers to segments within the collective audience. In this campaign the client used an incentivized redemption offer in the Call to Sign up for Certification Training & Exam at the per send level.

Our OEM didn’t just send a single batch and blast that may not have served the interest of each partner. They, instead, leveraged recipient engagement to create new segments, delivering this message in a three-email echo templatized campaign, that ultimately created a new segment from the actions recorded to the Custom Data Object (CDO).

High value incentives can traditionally be hard to deliver across thousands of partners. However, by segmenting, we uncover the most valuable tactics to ramp up or reengage authorized sellers as needed. In the case of our OEM, the client was empowered to efficiently leverage vouchers for limited quantity high-cost assets such as Certification Training & Exam. This segmenting strategy achieved fast and effective results.

Addressing Loyal or ‘At-Risk’ Audiences

Your cheerfully engaged partners whose actions indicate they are abreast of the latest developments are treated to a personalized service that further strengthens brand loyalty. The dynamic approach offers exclusive content, specific messages that acknowledge their part in the overall success of the launch, and even feedback tools such as survey links. Each aspect bolsters the relationship while improving program delivery and gathering valuable feedback from an engaged and informed user base.

For your most valuable at-risk partners modern marketers can triage based on engagement trends throughout the campaign, experiment with incentives to understand what resonates within this particular group or deliver evangelist communication to help shore up or cement partnerships.

Knowledge is Power – The Internet of Behaviors

As modern marketers, we already know we must ensure our message feels unique to stand out in a crowded inbox. Feeling valued and personally addressed keeps our audiences on the path we want them to follow. After all, personalization is as old as the mail merge.

The closer your contact profiles resemble the real people behind the email address, the more data you as a Marketer have to best inform their experience. You may even uncover opportunities to evolve long held general best practices thanks to improved insight into your specific contacts engagement.

Content has become a wildly competitive arena as users are inundated with messaging. With so much valuable information being discarded, email marketing must evolve beyond simple name insertions, opened emails and clicked links. The dynamic approach is that evolution. Marketers can further their understanding into what drives audiences allowing us to educate our entire organizations on customer's needs and buyer journeys. Most importantly, dynamic content empowers modern marketers to deliver content people actually care about.

Source

About the Author

Amy is a former Marketing Strategy Lead at Tegrita. Working on top brands in the Tech and Automotive industry she developed a best in class digital strategy leader with the experience to see clients through recessions, economic downturns, dependent industry booms and their subsequent busts.