Every relationship starts when two strangers connect for the first time and engage in conversation. In online marketing, that conversation typically begins on a website product page or landing page after a potential customer has conducted a specific search on Google (other search engines are available) or clicked on a link on a piece of content or social network.
From that initial click, marketers can learn a lot about their potential customer’s buying habits. In the seconds it takes to leap from a search engine to a website, we already know what products or services our visitors are interested in. So why not use this information to tailor the buying experience for that specific customer? Dynamic content allows marketers to do precisely that.
What is Dynamic Content?
Dynamic content is highly personalized content crafted to individual users’ specific needs and interests. This personalized content can be delivered online via a website based on previous engagement and triggered by cookies and/or an account login.
Dynamic content can also be delivered via email as part of a sophisticated marketing automation campaign. These emails can be triggered by specific engagements on your website, social media channels, email campaigns or other customer touchpoints.
Dynamic content sounds complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be as simple as addressing your website visitors or email subscribers by their name or delivering content based on easily defined criteria such as the customer’s geographic location or previous engagements.
As with all marketing strategies, taking your first steps towards dynamic content can often be the hardest. However, once you’ve taken those first steps, you’ll want to do more and optimize your campaigns accordingly.
Online Buyers Love Dynamic Content
Dynamic content helps vast eCommerce businesses offer the kind of personal service that customers would normally only expect from a much smaller enterprise. Within just a few clicks, that eCommerce site can start gathering information about its customers’ preferences to ensure that every subsequent visit offers a more relevant shopping experience. It’s the digital marketing equivalent of a department store displaying only the most appropriate products to customers from the moment they walk in the front door — an impossible task.
This strategy helps eCommerce sites serve an incredibly diverse audience with an extremely focused message.
For example, if a potential customer visited an online sports store looking for new running shoes, the retailer would know on subsequent visits, they should present items that are only relevant to that customers’ interest. The most obvious dynamic content strategy would be to display similar running shoes until a purchase has been made. Once that business has been secured, the strategy could then shift to other lines of running apparel and accessories. Because birds of a feather flock together, a more sophisticated approach might include displaying items similar customers have purchased.
Suddenly, that vast, faceless online store full of thousands of irrelevant SKUs seems like a very familiar place, tailored to the individual customer’s needs.
Dynamic Content Works for B2B Audiences Too
Dynamic content isn’t just a powerful B2C marketing tool for online retailers. This personal experience can easily be adapted for B2B marketers and content-led sites. It’s simply a case of getting to know your website visitors and using dynamic content to place the right content in front of the right person at the right time.
In many ways, this strategy is the perfect illustration of something emfluence highlights in our own marketing with the tag line: “One-to-one, and then some”.
Building Better Online Relationships with Dynamic Email
Online relationships get better with time. Those initial “conversations” that allow marketers to dynamically deliver site content based on previous engagements become supercharged the moment a visitor becomes a subscriber or a customer.
This is the moment the visitor has given you permission to address them by name and send regular communications via email. This permission means that as an online marketer, you can continue your relationship in the customers’ own territory and not just on your website. This means we can “push” as well as “pull” and are no longer at the mercy of our visitors’ habits. In short, we can steer the conversation.
While it’s not unusual for marketers to refer to our email campaigns as being part of a conversation, adding dynamic content can make that conversation seem more focused, targeted and, dare I say, more intelligent and more personal. And when marketing campaigns appear more intelligent and personal, who can resist them?
Old School Marketing Skills Still Apply
While dynamic content might appear very new and exciting, it will still require a considerable investment in old school marketing skills to create all the dynamic elements to feed your campaigns.
As has always been the case, the most successful marketers will be the ones who take the time to understand their clients’ problems and set clear objectives to resolve them. Invest in this basic strategy first, and your dynamic content will (almost) write itself.
Dynamic content doesn’t have to be an “all or nothing” strategy. You can start by adding simple dynamic elements to your campaigns and serve static content when other elements aren’t yet available. Isn’t this what successful marketing is all about—looking for those marginal gains?
Do you need help getting more personal with your dynamic content? Contact us today at expert@emfluence.com.
