You’ve heard about how important having engaging content is to your marketing strategy, but it’s no good if it’s not useful to the people who see it. You want your content to be relevant to the person reading it. But how do you make sure you’re getting it to that person? Through dynamic content.
Dynamic content is content that changes based on who is looking at it. It’s the headline and the calls-to-action on your website that are tailored to the person viewing them, or the emails that are customised for the recipient. Marketing is all about personalisation, and getting the right content to the right people.
Why is personalization so important?
Why should I care?’ I hear you ask. Because your customer doesn’t want to be shown something that they’re not interested in. 74% of customers get annoyed when the content that they are shown on your website doesn’t apply to them.
91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who provide relevant offers and recommendations (Accenture).
Marketing is all about building relationships with your customers and prospects. A large part of that is making the customer feel like they’re doing business with someone who cares about them. The more personalized their experience the more likely they are to come back and do business with you again.
Not only can it improve your customer retention, but it can increase your conversions as well. Hubspot found that their conversion rate increased by 42% with personalised CTAs compared to basic ones.
It’s difficult to argue against personalizing your customer’s experience. Using dynamic content is one of the best ways to do this. Here’s a few tips on how to implement dynamic content into your marketing strategy.
1. Segmentation
Segmentation is a way of targeting certain customers based on certain criteria, and is the best place to start building your dynamic content.
Let’s look at two ways to segment your audience:
A. Buyer journey
The easiest way, and best way if you are just starting out, is to segment your prospects by what stage of the sales funnel they are at, the top, the middle or the bottom. You will have different content for each level so it will be easy to know what to show each prospect.
For example, if someone has just downloaded an e-book then they are at the top of the sales funnel. You want to show them industry-related content, not specific to your product. Someone at the bottom of the sales funnel should be shown CTAs that offer free trials or demos as they are more ready to buy.
You can also use personalised content to nudge the prospect from their current stage into the next.
B. Personal and professional attributes
There are many other ways to segment customers, such as by industry, job title, location, buying frequency and many more. These all depend on the amount of information you have on the customer. The more information you can gather, through forms or downloaded content, the more personalised you can get.
A sports retailer I have worked with would segment their email content based on their sex, location (team they support) and age. They would also send personalised happy birthday messages.
Consumers are 40% more likely to view items that are recommended based on information they’ve shared with the brand (Harvard Business Review).
In a B2B enterprise software company we were selling four different software products to Airlines. I would try to segment dynamic content based on what resource or ebook the person first downloaded on the website. If I was unable to determine what product they were interested in I would automatically send the following email. Based on what product was clicked I would then send relevant follow-up content.
2. Set up rules and lead scoring
Once you’ve got your segmentation done, it’s time to set up rules for the criteria of each segment. This is to make sure that your system knows what content to show someone when they meet a certain set of criteria. Say for example, you set up a rule that says once a prospect has downloaded a certain amount of e-books or whitepapers, and been in contact with the company a certain amount of times, they are in the middle of the sales funnel. Then your system will know that when they visit your website, they are to be shown the content that is suitable for this stage in the sales process.
This involves having a good CRM system in place. This will ensure that you have all of your customers’ information and data stored together and it is easily accessible. If a customer has filled in any form, downloaded any content, opened any email, or been in contact with your company, all of that information is kept track of in the CRM system.
I have used a few systems for this over the years. Pardot from Salesforce most recently. Hubspot, Adobe, Marketo are all pretty similar and all are expensive once you start building your database. Mautic is a free opensource option but you do need to install and manage it yourself.
Each interaction with your content can assign the lead a score and when the lead hits a score determined by you it can trigger different events.
This can then be linked to a content-generating system. This can use the information and data to figure out what content to show the customer once they go onto your website. This can be complicated and time-consuming to set up, but it’s worth it once it’s done.
3. Dynamic content and personalization
Once you’ve set up your rules and content generating system, you can start reaping the benefits of your dynamic content.
A. Personalize emails
This is so much more than just having someone’s name at the top of the email. With dynamic content you can make your emails location or industry-specific, as well as giving the recipient beginner, intermediate or expert level content about your product, instead of just sending out generic emails that may not be relevant to everyone.
B. Eliminate repeat forms
Customers don’t want to be filling out the same details over and over again, but sometimes you have content that they want behind a form. Using the information from your CRM, your system will know when a customer has already given you details in a certain form, so won’t ask for it again. By asking for different information every time the customer fills out a form, you are also gaining more insight into your customer so you can tailor your content even more.
As well as this, your system will know if a customer has already downloaded certain content from your website. Instead of showing them the same content again, they will be shown something similar, but slightly more specific. This will help push them through the sales funnel.
C. Personalized ‘thank-you’ pages
Customers are sent to a ‘thank-you’ page once a customer fills out a form or downloads content. Dynamic content can help you use this page to get the customer further into the sales funnel. Instead of just saying ‘Thank You’, add in a CTA that is related to the content they just downloaded. But, make sure that it moves them further along the funnel. Another e-book, or signing up for a newsletter, for example. These are all things that will get your customer to give you more information, so that you can tailor their experience even more, so eventually they will become fully qualified customers.
Personalization is the key to great marketing. Dynamic content will make your customer feel welcome on your website. This means that they’re more likely to want to spend time there, getting to know you and your product. Don’t make your customer feel like they are just another click. Use dynamic content to make them feel special.
