Email – Dynamic Content

Owned by Bettina Lippisch, created
Last updated: May 30, 2024
6 min read

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Overview

Oftentimes, you’d like to send personalized or customized emails to your customers without setting up multiple emails. For example, you can send targeted offers to customers with varying subscription class, different articles based on their interests or web behavior, or personalized content based on their locale and more.
To setup dynamic email content for your *customers, you first need to define how to differentiate your customers based on rules. For example, you may have a rule “Illinois” for everyone who lives in Illinois and a rule “Alaska” for everyone who lives in Alaska. Everyone who lives in Illinois or Alaska will receive their respective offer while all other customers will receive a default offer.
Once the rules are defined, you will then create dynamic content tags based on these rules and insert them into your email content, subject line and From Name.

*Dynamic content is only available for internal lists, i.e. records with a valid Customer ID. This can either be an Audience Builder (OnQ) query or an internal list output from Audience Builder.

Adding Demographics in Dynamic Content Rules

If you want to use demographics as part of your dynamic content rules, you need to select the ones you want in Email Builder (Omail)>Tools>Deployment Defaults under the Brand Defaults. Only certain administrators can perform this task. If you have any questions, please contact the Email Builder team.

Go to Email Builder, select your Organization and Database.

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  1.  If you scroll down under “Brand Defaults,” you will see the “Dynamic Demographics” link. Select any of the demographics you’d like to use for dynamic content rules and click the Add button. You may remove any added items with the Remove button. Once all changes are made, click Save Changes button on the Brand Defaults.

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Creating Dynamic Content Deployment

When you create a deployment, in the Deployment Summary pleat, check the Use Dynamic Content checkbox. If you use Dynamic Content, you may not use Triggered deployments or On Demand Send API or A/B Testing for the same deployment.

Audience: You must attach the audience list via Select OnQ Query or Select Internal List option. The dynamic content works by reading the data field from the database and the list must contain the customer ID.

In the Dynamic Content Rules pleat, you can enter the rule name, description and the condition(s). The rule name and the rule description are mandatory fields. Your rule name should be specific to the criteria you are using for your rule, as you will need to select the rules by this name. For example, if you are setting a rule to display content based on reader’s state code, you will want to use the state in question to name the rule. You may add as many conditions as you want within one rule. Once you are done creating your rule, click the Save Rule button.

Note that any rules created in this deployment will be saved in the Rule Library automatically. To allow your rule library to be available for another deployment you must clone your original deployment. To the right of any saved rule, you can edit it by clicking the pencil icon or delete it with the red x icon.

Inserting Dynamic Content Tags

To insert dynamic content, you will create tags to identify the dynamic vs default content. Subsequently, you will insert these tags into your message content, subject line and/or From Name.

  1. In the Message Content Pleat, you must upload your content and Save before you can define the new tag. NOTE: The text content boxes will be visible even if HTML only is selected and can be ignored for HTML only sends except when you want to add the From and Subject dynamic content tags. Go to Inserting From and Subject Dynamic Content Tags section below for more information.

  2. Click the Define New Tag dropdown and select Define New Tag.

  3. Enter a Tag Name and the default content that would be displayed.

  1. Click Add Condition and select one of the existing dynamic content rules. Then enter the content that would be displayed to the customers who meet these conditions.

  1. You can add more conditions if necessary. Let’s say for your Region Tag, you have a Default content, then Illinois rule content, and then Alaska rules. Based on the order you set it up,

    1. Anyone who meets the Illinois rule will get the Illinois content

    2. Then anyone who lives in Alaska will receive the Alaska content

    3. Everyone else will receive the default content

If at any time you are “stuck” in the Define Dynamic Content Tag pleat, you must either Save or Cancel to return to the message content.

After New Tag is defined, insert your tag into your message body area where the dynamic content message would display. Save the message.

Inserting From and Subject Dynamic Content Tags

If you create Dynamic Content Tags for Subject line and/or From name, you must enter the content in the Dynamic Tag Text Content box. You can only use the text content of Dynamic tag for email headers (Subject and From).

To enter the tags for the From and Subject boxes, you can enter the merge variables or use the Insert Dynamic Tag drop down to insert them (as long as your mouse is in either the From or Subject text boxes).

You can review and edit any of your existing Dynamic Content Tags by clicking the Edit link. Notice all tags begin with “DC_”. To insert the tags into your html or text message content, add them as a merge variable @{DC_name}@. Save the message.

Testing and Sending

  1. In the Test, Seed and Approval Recipients pleat, you can select the version your seed should receive. You can expand the dynamic versions for easier viewing or collapse them.