The future of email will heavily depend on how fast marketers are in providing valuable content to their respective databases. It’s no longer a game of broadcast, wish and wait for it to all turn out great. For a successful campaign to hit the target and exceed expectations it has to provide value to each customer. This increases its relevancy, and greatly improves the desired response rates.

Of late, dynamic content in email has seen a surge in interest. It’s helping email marketers expand their horizons by allowing them to customise mailers depending on individual characteristics of the audience.

You might be thinking that dynamic content is like list segmentation, but these two are very different. One is the division of an entire database into smaller groups that share near-common characteristics (list segmentation), while the other is a high level of personalisation (dynamic content).

Dynamic content offers marketers the opportunity to fully personalise emails according to each customer’s characteristics. The simplest way of explaining it is the personalisation of salutations. However, it goes deeper than just the receiver’s name.

New software now allows email marketers to fully customise emails depending on the information they have in their database. This may include the audience’s job title, contact details, purchasing history or personal interests. The opportunities are boundless, offering the creative and strategic marketer the chance to effectively engage with customers on a higher level.

According to a white paper by Email On Acid, brands such as AVARI experienced an increase of 73% in CTOR (or click-to-open rate) by implementing predictive dynamic content into their emails.

When you start using predictive dynamic content, you realise that you’re at a position to create a single HTML email, but pull individualised data that your reader may find interesting into it. This means that each customer will probably see the same overall design, but the content will differ partially or very significantly depending on the skills of the email marketer. The more a customer sees content that is genuinely meant for them, the more likely they are to click on it.

Dynamic content also offers marketers and sales representatives the opportunity to create a more engaging sales funnel. This is because comprehensive database information can help you determine where in the buying cycle the customer is. So you can broadcast the same email design, but with personalised information helping the customer to make more informative decisions.

For example, someone who just signed up on your database and ticked boxes of products or hobbies they enjoy and has never bought anything from your brand can receive an email providing product information based on their hobbies. Whereas, an existing customer can receive discount offers and product recommendations based on their past purchases. Someone who abandoned their shopping basket can be targeted with special offers on the products they left behind.

What this means is that you’re no longer manually generating multiple emails for your lists, but are now pulling data from your database to base the content you’re going to send. Dynamic content can also range from just salutations to entire images differentiating from one email to the other.

Where marketers need to start deciding on the best approach to implementing dynamic content is in choosing their Email Service Providers (ESPs) wisely. This is because ESPs offer a varying degree of dynamic content capabilities. Some may just allow for name personalisation, while others can automate the entire process from changing entire sections of copy to pulling a different image for each customer.

Dynamic content is no longer just an option. It’s mandatory in a world where competition continues to step up the antics, creating more surreal emails that are all engaging to the customer. For emails to stand out marketers must now begin to think of how to produce dynamic content in emails that resonates with each customer. Not only will moving to dynamic content ensure that there is an increase of opens and responses, but also save the marketer time and probably a considerable amount of money.