Emails have come a long way from static text canvases that remain the same before and after you click the “Send” button to advanced personalized newsletters that change their content, depending on whose inbox they end up in. Dynamic content helps marketers deliver highly personalized emails without building dozens of templates. You can easily lead highly personalized campaigns, implement multilingual support and segmentation by behavior or location, and much more. According to statistics, dynamic content increases the ROI of email newsletters by 100%.
However, dynamic content makes emails smarter but harder for marketers to manage. In this article, we’ll show you what dynamic email content is, how modules make your life easier when dealing with dynamic content, a breakdown of the main ways to create dynamic content, and how to create modules with them quickly.
What is a dynamic email, and when do you use it?
First, let’s start with the basics. Dynamic email content, at its core, is content that changes based on who is receiving the message and pre-defined settings, meaning it adapts based on recipient data or rules. This allows marketers to send a single message tailored to each recipient’s needs and interests rather than creating and sending multiple emails to each recipient individually, which can be pretty tiresome.
But why use dynamic content when statics get the job done? We have three reasons for you:
- Timesaving, as you need to create only one email (with all possible content variations) that suits the needs of your audience. You’re creating one email and sending it, but your audience will see all the diverse variations, depending on the criteria you set earlier.
- Personalization, since using dynamic content provides marketers with an easy way to personalize. For example, you can create one promotional campaign, yet all your subscribers receive different content relevant to their interests, previous actions, gender, and other criteria.
- Real-time updates make your email content fresh, as dynamic content (for example, in trigger emails) can be sent and updated automatically without your involvement.
Use cases of dynamic content
But how exactly do you use dynamic content in real email marketing scenarios? There’s a whole list you can choose from:
- personalized greetings based on names from your email list;
- different regional and language versions of emails depending on where your recipients are located;
- gender-specific or geo-specific promo campaigns;
- behavior-driven product recommendations based on previous recipients’ interactions with your brand.
These scenarios just scratch the surface of what you can do with dynamic content in your emails and how you can upgrade your overall email marketing.
Why modules are a game-changer for working with dynamic content
But what about modules? We’re all here for them. And rightly so. Even though dynamic content is a standalone thing, and modules seem like opposites, their synergy can make your life as an email marketer much easier.
Build with dynamic content once, reuse across multiple emails
First, when creating emails with dynamic content, you can create different versions of emails with such conditions (product cards, blog digests, and much more). In one version, the design is different, and in another, the text, and so on. Creating this from scratch every time is a waste of time and resources if you want to use the developments again. Modules, in turn, allow you to save any element of the email and reuse it to create new email campaigns. Namely, you created a product card, wrote down all the necessary conditions, and then saved it in a module in your library. In the future, you can simply add this module and skip the steps with the design and writing conditions.
But how can this advantage be used in real marketing conditions? For example, modules and dynamic content synergy are of great help when running multilingual email campaigns. You create the needed email parts in all the languages required. After that, you set the necessary conditions for each language version (in plain language, “show this recipient the Spanish version of this block, if…”).
Once it’s done, you save each email part and tie the needed parameters as separate modules. And voilà, you have a library of pre-set modules for different regions that you can swap on the go. If you’re planning to send emails to Spanish, German, and American recipients, create an email with Spanish, German, and English conditions.
Set new rules, then update everything at scale
In addition, if the modules that you save to the library are synchronized, you can make bulk updates to your templates. The peculiarity of synchronized modules is that when you make changes to these modules, they are transferred to all templates where these modules are used. So any changes to your dynamic content will be reflected in all emails with this module, allowing you to keep your templates up to date without any headaches. For example, you can have a module with dynamic content in many of your templates. However, there is a time to slightly change the rules for the content. Changing each template manually is tedious and time-consuming, while modules allow you to change it, and one module, while all the changes transfer to all templates with this module.
Team effort: Split responsibilities without losing consistency
Dozens of marketers can work on a single email campaign, sharing responsibilities among themselves. Dynamic content itself is an independent feature that can be part of the entire email creation process, for which a separate marketer will be responsible.
Modules, in turn, are a great boost to collaboration between marketers. For example, a designer created an email design from scratch and packed all the necessary email elements and display options into modules. After that, another marketer simply assembles an email from these modules, substitutes the dynamic content variables, and the email goes further along the chain. Email creation is divided into certain stages, and the next chain uses the developments of the previous one, which largely streamlines the process and increases the degree of teamwork.
Dynamic content tools — and how modules help you manage them
Dynamic content is a pretty broad definition, but behind it stand different ways of making your email content dynamic.
Display conditions
The name “Display Conditions” is pretty much self-explanatory. It’s a set of conditions that allow you to dynamically change the content of the email or template displayed to recipients after sending, depending on whether or not the specified condition is met.
This is how it can look. For example, you are a sportswear business and want to promote your new line of sneakers. Here’s an email that your male audience will see:
And here’s the female audience version that will land in their mailboxes.
Meanwhile, in the editor, the whole structure looks like this:
You can create different emails with dynamic content that can be:
- different language (in this case, you must apply display conditions to the whole email);
- genders;
- various age categories;
- countries and regions;
- and much more.
Yes, it’s just one email with two of these different elements. We just set specific conditions for each of them, and when they are met, your recipient will see an email with a corresponding block, while the other one is hidden from their eyes. As a result, you don’t need to create two separate emails. This approach works best for different condition-based emails that depend on gender, location, language, and so on.
Modules give you an option to save all the needed blocks with tied Display Conditions for easy reuse in further email campaigns, so there’s no need to manually set conditions each time your campaign needs to have a new email.
How to create a module with display conditions
Now, it’s time to create an email piece with display conditions and save it as a module. First, we’ll create the email part itself, and then we’ll deal with display conditions.
Creating card
- click on the New Message button;
- you’ll see this screen where you must click on the Basic and then on the Empty template to pick it and start working on the email piece from scratch;
- the editor is now open, and you see the Empty template, which will serve as a cornerstone of our future modules;
- to achieve the design structure as in our example, we need to delete the header and footer stripes;
- this is what it must look like;
- after that, we take the Image block and drop it into the structure;
- the same goes for the two Text blocks that we add right under our Image block;
- after that, we add the final Button block;
Our basic layout is done, so now it’s time to work on the content. First, we need to add an image to our product promo.
- click on the Image block to open the uploading window, then click on it (we upload a pre-saved image from our device);
- once the image is uploaded, you’ll see the Image block settings;
- after that, we add the necessary texts by simply clicking on the Text blocks and pasting our texts;
- to add needed text to the button block, click on it and paste the text into the Button Text field;
Now let’s work on our styles to make this sneaker’s promo look good. The first change we need to make is to set a background color.
- click on the structure, and in the Styles tab, change the Background Color to edf6f9;
- click in the image block and set size to 420 and Radius to 20, so our image can have neat roundings;
- next, we tweak our first Text block by making the Paragraph Style as H1 and aligning the text to the center;
- after that, we change the font family to Stripo Montserrat in the Styles settings;
- once it’s done, we set the Font Size to 36 and Font Color to 006d77;
- the final tweak is setting the text style to bold.
We’ll speed up a bit on the next Text block, as the process of setting it is almost the same. We’ll just mark the differences in style that you should apply.
- set the Font Family to Trebuchet MS, Size to 16, and color to complete black.
Adjusting the Button block is easy, as all the settings are on the same page. Set your Button Color to e29578, Font Family to Stripo Montserrat, Text Style to bold, and Border Radius to 8.
Last but not least is tweaking paddings so everything looks good. These are the paddings for our whole structure.
These paddings we set for our first Text block.
Our second Text block receives these padding numbers.
The Button block will be surrounded by these paddings.
Setting display conditions
Now, let’s talk about the main part, namely creating display conditions that you will use. First things first, setting them up starts with the Account tweaking.
- go to Settings, click on the Workspace, and choose Groups or Projects depending on where you want to apply Display Conditions settings (to the whole group or a separate project);
- click on the three dots and then on the Settings button to open the settings for the group (or project, depending on where you decided to apply Display Conditions);
- click on the Display Conditions switch to open the settings of this feature;
- click on the Create a Condition button to open this menu;
In our example, we need to create a condition for the male and female newsletter options, so we fill in all the necessary fields. Let’s create the first condition for a male newsletter. The basic information we fill in looks like this. It’s a simple name of the future condition, a category name we chose, and a short description. All this information is to find this condition easily (the more conditions you have, the bigger your library, so you need to categorize your conditions properly).
Now, let’s get to the fun part. Each Display Condition is a certain piece of code that helps to work with data and determine whether the condition is met or not. The code is split into two parts:
- Template Engine Open Code
- Template Engine Close Code
To create a Display Condition, both of these fields have to be filled in.
Important note: The code for opening and closing conditions is not unified and differs from ESP to ESP. Before creating your own conditions, you should contact your ESP support, so they can explain to you how they handle Display Conditions and what code pieces will work for them. In our example, we’ll use a simple piece just to show you how to create conditions in Stripo.
In our example, the open code will look like this:
Meanwhile, the closing code is simpler and looks like this:
We paste this code into the corresponding fields and click on the Save Condition button.
And now you have your Display Condition saved.
The process is the same for the female email Display Condition, so we’ll not stop here in detail. The only important thing here is the code you must paste so that this condition can do its job:
