What is a dynamic email in content marketing?

When it comes to modern marketing, personalization is key. Customers are inundated with emails, ads, and other marketing messages throughout their days. The best way to differentiate your brand from competitors is to personalize your marketing content by offering targeted deals, referring to customers by their names, and so on.

The only problem: it’s tough to personalize emails at scale. However, there is a potential solution in the form of dynamic emails. 

But what is a dynamic email? This guide will explain dynamic emails in content marketing, the benefits of using them, and how to practice dynamic email marketing step-by-step. 

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What Is a Dynamic Email?

A dynamic email has content that automatically changes to personalize the message based on your recipients’ preferences, behaviors, and gathered data. 

For example, you might send out a mass email blast to your entire email marketing list. Although those emails may all share a base template, each customer gets a slightly adjusted email message referring to them by name, mentioning a previous purchase, recommending specific offers, etc.

A dynamic email sent by a real estate agent may offer a custom message to buyers based on the neighborhood or price range they indicated. 

Dynamic emails are an effective marketing tactic because they adjust to fit the needs or preferences of recipients while retaining cost-effectiveness at scale. Through dynamic email marketing, you can personalize many different aspects of email messages, from text to visuals to calls to action. In this way, your marketing messages will resonate more directly with your target consumers and increase engagement across the board.
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Email elements you can make dynamic

In any marketing email, you can adjust or program different elements to be dynamic to reflect customer tastes, contact information, and more. Here are a few email elements you can make dynamic in your email outreach, but we’d encourage you to experiment and find other ways to customize dynamic emails.

Subject line

Try a dynamic email subject line that directly mentions the products offered in the email’s body (those products will also change depending on customer data, of course). This requires a tool that allows you to enter a variable in the subject line of your email outreach.

Customer information

You can personalize your message to include the recipient’s name in communications, such as the greeting in the email body or the subject line. While this has become common practice, it still helps to grab a customer’s attention right out of the gate.

Images, videos, and visual content

Next, you can make the visuals in your email content dynamic and engaging. Images, videos, illustrations, and even GIFs can be dynamic based on customer needs, purchase history, and so on. 

Important dates

Have a sale, deadline, or event coming up? Try including a dynamic countdown clock for special holiday sales or inventory updates to inspire a sense of urgency in your email recipients.

CTAs

Call to action (CTA) buttons are meant to grab the attention of your subscribers and direct them to take specific action. Often, they lead to a product page where they can purchase the item you’re promoting. Sales teams will also include a CTA that links to a scheduler for a sales demo or consultation call.

You can customize your CTA button to boost your click-through rate by directly mentioning a recommended product or suggesting different actions based on where they are in your sales or marketing funnel.

Make sure you’re sending your marketing emails from a professional email address. This will instill trust in customers and make them more likely to click through to your site. 
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The benefits of dynamic email

There are many benefits to leveraging dynamic email content in your marketing campaigns. These benefits include:

• Improved customer experience. When you use dynamic email content, you can cater your marketing messages, including special offers or discounts, to each customer. Personalized email content makes customers feel more connected to your brand and less like another cog in the machine. More importantly, this may incentivize customers to return to your brand instead of checking out your competitors.
• Greater efficiency when scaling email marketing. Through dynamic email content, your team can create personalized customer experiences at scale without spending too much time on any one customer at the top of your marketing or sales funnel. Through dynamic email content, you don’t need to make a unique email for every lead. You can make one email template, then switch up aspects of that content based on customer segments or unique needs.
• Improved campaign engagement. By providing customers with content that speaks directly to them, they are more likely to read your emails and interact with them by clicking on product suggestions, visiting your website, and more. 
• More efficient resource management for your team. Since your team members don’t need to craft individual marketing messages for every customer, they can focus on other elements of running your business, ranging from data analytics to sales.

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How to create a dynamic email

It’s one thing to know the benefits of dynamic email marketing; it’s another to employ this marketing tactic effectively and efficiently. 

The next section will explain how you can use dynamic email content in your upcoming marketing efforts, even if you don’t have any experience yet.

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1. Collect customer data

In order to create a dynamic email, you need to collect extensive customer data. Gathering customer data is important for any type of marketing, not just dynamic email marketing. 

You should already be doing this using a comprehensive CRM platform, email and link tracking, and other tools that help you understand your customers’ goals and behavior. 

However, you may need better customer data than you’ve been collecting to make resonating, accurate dynamic content for your leads. You can do this in a few different ways:

• Customer interviews. Conduct customer interviews to learn what customers want from your products or services, how they learned about you, and more.
• Gather information during the sign-up process. Decide on a few pieces of information that will help you create dynamic emails and ask for it up front when your customer signs up. For example, you could ask the size of a B2B client’s organization, or the problem a lead is trying to solve. 
• Reviews and surveys. Use reviews and surveys to gather information and feedback from existing customers. Give your customers as many ways as possible to provide feedback, and you’ll find yourself swimming in an ocean of data you can use to personalize and improve customer experiences.
• Research. Data doesn’t lie, so dig into your CRM or sales records to understand purchase behavior. For example, create a filter to see a segment of B2B clients with 10-20 people in their organization. Next, look at which products or services they purchased. If you can spot a trend, you know what to promote in your next dynamic email to B2B clients with 10-20 people in their organization.

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2. Segment your customers

Your next step is to segment customers into different groups or demographics. When you divide your subscribers into distinct groups, you’ll be able to increase email engagement by making more targeted, effective email ads and newsletters for each group.

Some common ways to segment your leads and customers include: 

• Where they are in your customer lifecycle or sales/marketing funnel
• Industry
• Organization size
• Location or region
• Customer type - B2B, B2C, etc.
• Purchase history
• Lead source
• Engagement with previous emails and outreach

Each of these data points should be a column or field in your CRM. Some CRMs will auto-enrich your contact data by scraping publicly available sites (like LinkedIn and social media) and including information about organization size, industry, and location.

In any case, conduct thorough research and create customer segments based on their purchases, where they are in the purchase funnel, etc. Then you can create different classes or types of emails that speak to different needs.

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3. Customize dynamic email content

The third step is to customize dynamic email messages and content based on your customer segments, as well as their unique wants/needs. Like with invoicing templates, it’s wise to start with basic email templates that have room to grow or shift based on what you find to be successful.

Get creative with this part; there’s no real limit to how you can provide personalized content to your subscribers. 

For instance, you can use your customer’s purchase history to recommend products that complement previous purchases. You could also compare customer data points between potential and existing customers. If your data shows that customers in a certain age range or industry tend to purchase a particular product, try marketing that product to leads in your funnel that match the same criteria.

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Scale email outreach and appeal to customers with dynamic emails in Gmail

Dynamic email content is a great option if you want to scale your marketing efforts and appeal to your customers in the personal, customer-oriented way they’ve come to expect. With dynamic emailing, you can connect to your target audience members and scale your brand without sacrificing quality or your budget.

Tools like Streak offer free email tracking, CRM, and mass email capabilities right in Gmail. Add leads directly from your inbox, record details from your conversations, and create auto-enriched contacts for each prospect. 

When you’re ready to send email outreach to your email list, insert data from your contacts and CRM as variables in your dynamic email, and send away.