What is dynamic content in Mailchimp ?
When considering your whole email strategy, personalization is a must have to create relevant messages , and increase your conversion chances. Personalization for email includes way more than adding “Dear Eva” to your message. You can personalize text paragraphs, coupons codes, QR codes, reduction amount, or offers, but also images. All of these parameters can be gathered under one term “Dynamic content”.
We often use this term to talk about a website page. Dynamic content refers to the practice of personalizing your sales pages in order to match your different targets. It is also an amazing tool for your SEO, and Adwords campaigns. But Dynamic content can also be applied to emails. In fact it is present in Mailchimp top features, so it is natural to wonder what Mailchimp dynamic content is exactly and why it is important for email personalization.
Dynamic content for emails
According to Mailchimp “Dynamic content” is a feature dedicated to adapt the same message to different targets. Applied to a specific block of email, this feature automatically hides or shows the block depending on the conditions you define.
Indeed, having personalized content is key to better reach your target, and create engagement.
It is way more than making your contact feel special, it is about talking to him in a way he can relate, and choosing carefully the right words and arguments that match his pain points, his challenges, and his reality. In a global approach , the goal is that the same message will be delivered to each contact, but in a different way, with different arguments in order to always present the right content to the right person.
To be more relatable we can explain it with a concrete use case scenario. Let’s say you’re a travel company that wants to offer different summer promotions to your different target groups.
- You have clients under 30 years old that are mostly single and like to travel outside Europe.
- Clients between 35 & 45 years olds that travels in family and like europeans destinations
- And clients over 60 that enjoy their retirement in all inclusive vacations.
To launch your summer campaign you will write the same email and add a Mailchimp dynamic content block for the promotion part, that will change according to your different audience groups. So that they can see either :
- A 30% promotion for international destination
- A 50% family promotion for an up to 6 persons trip for any destination in Europe
- 15% off for every all inclusive trip booked before the 1st july.
You see here, instead of doing 3 email campaigns you can do just one and personalize the block according to your different groups.
How does dynamic content work ?
Segment your audience
This preliminary step is important to align with your campaign's objectives. Think about your main goal for this campaign and brainstorm on the different arguments that will speak to your target. If you come up with different ones, you may want to take a look at your personas. Indeed, oftenly we already think about target arguments rather than general ones.
For your email personalization to serve a purpose, you have to ask yourself the right questions and decide how you want to divide your audience. Making this brain work will also force you to assess the necessity of these audience segmentation. It is not always necessary, you have to make sure it makes sense as you don’t want this time saving practice to become time wasting and overkill.
Once you’ve decided, go to your mailchimp audience and create groups and or tags to help you during the following steps.
Create your message
Now you have to create your message or messages according to each audience group. And here it is you have to choose the nature of your mailchimp dynamic content, as you can personalize :
- A contact information
For this kind of personalization, merge tags are the easiest way to go. we know it well for the contact name for example, *|FNAME|*. But you can also use it for interests, for addresses, pack or offer names …
- A commercial argument
Here the nature of your block will be a text one, you just have to write different texts or arguments that will speak to your different groups. With this type of block you can use dynamic content feature.
- An image
Personalized images give a whole new dimension to your emails as they will make the first and last impression and mark minds. This is the type of dynamic content that will differentiate your email campaign from the daily flow of emails we all receive. Here you can use the dynamic content feature , but also the <code block> type to change the image.
Our advice :
- to personalize individually your email , use the code block
- to personalize by segment, use the dynamic content feature.
If you are interested in knowing more about Mailchimp dynamic images you can read this tutorial.
- A CTA
You can also choose to have different actions for each target group. Sometimes you’ll need to redirect them to different pages of your website, or even different surveys. The good thing is, even with dynamic content you’ll be able to track and gather data on these CTAs.
Set your conditions
If you need to use the Mailchimp dynamic content feature , your next step is to define the conditions. In fact you have to precise for each audience group, when and if you want the block to appear.
Mailchimp works with blocks. Each block can be of different nature (code, image, text, link, CTA, …). Most of these block types are compatible with dynamic content. If you want one of these blocks to be dynamic you can define it.
You can choose to display the block for one part of your audience, and hide it for another.
You can also choose to display the block for everyone , but with a different content for each target (like in our use case example above) , either way you have to set the conditions of your dynamic content with the 2 majors axes : “is” and “is not”.
And that’s it! You can launch your campaign and save some precious time, while still differentiate yourself and have a special attention for each one of your contacts 🎉
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