Making the Case for Predictive Dynamic Content

You need dynamic content in your emails. Why? Because consumers want more relevance. For example, 56% of people unsubscribe due to irrelevant content, while relevant email drives 18x more revenue than broadcast email. Dynamic content will keep your customers engaged and make your business more competitive.

Dynamic content enables you to send highly targeted email campaigns to your subscribers by automatically showing different content for different recipients. Think of it as creating several versions of a campaign (even thousands!), but only pressing the send button once.

There are many different types of dynamic content in email, running the gamut from old school (yet still effective) first name personalization to cutting-edge customization with context-based content or predictively personalized content recommendations. All of these methods have their own pros and cons, but one thing is clear — the more relevant the email content the better.

For example, AVARI customers are seeing an average lift in CTOR (click-to-open rate) of 73% for emails with predictively personalized content versus emails without it. The impact of personalization is even more dramatic for specific verticals like food and beverage or health and beauty.

A simple way to understand dynamic content is to compare it to segmentation. You segment your email list so that you can speak to different audiences in appropriately different ways. Segmenting your email list allows you to define interests that are specific to groupings of people. Then you can send tailored campaigns to each segment in order to be more relevant.

Predictive dynamic content is based on a similar notion, however the “segmentation” is much more precise and granular. Predictive technology uses data about your subscribers to automatically define segments that are as small as a handful of people with key similarities, or even just one person with unique interests. Manually segmenting a large email list with that kind of individual-level attention is otherwise impossible.

Automatically identifying the specific interests of the individual or micro-segment is the first step. Next, the right content must be selected and delivered to the correct recipient. To imagine how this works, consider each content section of an email as a separately controlled panel that can have different content displayed and changed depending on data about each user. Each content section of the email is dynamic and managed automatically.

Consider the significance of executing customized one-to-one experiences at scale. One email marketer can now reach 100,000 customers with the press of a single send button and each person will simultaneously feel like the interaction is all about themselves.

There are no segments to define, no rules or triggers to set up, and yet the results with predictive dynamic content are equivalent or better than these more sophisticated (complex) methods. Predictive dynamic content delivers automated relevance – and it’s the key to running a great email marketing program.

Sandy Hathaway is a co-founder and CMO of AVARI. AVARI enables automated in-the-moment campaign personalization with real-time predictive dynamic content and live social feeds using any email marketing platform.