What is Dynamic Email Content? Definition and Examples

Every morning, your audience’s inboxes are flooded with countless messages. The vast majority, crammed with one-size-fits-all messages, are quickly swiped into the digital abyss. 

But in this clutter, there are those few emails that pause thumbs and spark interest — the ones that seem to speak directly to the reader’s needs and preferences. 

This is the magic of personalization. More specifically, it’s dynamic email content — templated emails whose content matches what the subscriber finds more valuable. Dynamic content lets you transform your message from just another drop in the digital ocean to a message that resonates. 

In this post, we’ll discuss what dynamic email content is and how it can help you turn the challenge of email saturation into an opportunity to truly connect with your audience.

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What Is Dynamic Email Content?

Unlike traditional emails that deliver the same message to every subscriber, dynamic content tailors what each person sees when they open the email. In a nutshell, it involves tweaking parts of the HTML code to show content that matches customer data and preferences.

Dynamic content is an essential aspect of personalization. It lets you target each subscriber differently without sending a different email for each. 

There are two types of dynamic email content.

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Personalized Content Based on User Profiles

This involves tailoring parts of the email, such as the subject line or specific sentences, to align with information in a user’s profile. A common idea is to use the recipient’s name in the subject line and greeting. 

Once you add a merge field, your email marketing software pulls the data from each user’s profile and embeds the correct information before sending each email. 

Here’s how you can easily do this on our platform: 

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Segment-based Content Blocks

These are HTML code sections within the email that vary for different groups of subscribers. You segment your list and send each segment relevant content. The segmentation strategy can be based on various shared characteristics among groups, like location, age, or purchase history.

Suppose you own an online bookshop and plan to set up an email marketing campaign for Christmas. But not all customers have the same taste in books. 

So, you can create a personalized book recommendation campaign. You keep all parts of the email the same and change the recommendation section based on previous customer purchases. It’s an efficient method to fine-tune your copy to get better results. 

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Do You Need Technical Skills for Dynamic Email Content?

Implementing dynamic emails is simpler than many people think. You don’t need advanced technical skills. Basic familiarity with email marketing platforms is usually enough.

Most email marketing solutions include features like drag-and-drop editors, which let you easily create and customize your emails. These platforms also offer templates that you can use as a starting point for adding dynamic content. 

This means you can personalize emails based on subscriber data without needing to know complex coding or technical details.

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Real-World Dynamic Email Content Examples

With the definitions out of the way, let’s consider a few examples of successful campaigns that use dynamic content.  We’ll give you practical insights and inspiration to help you see how you can incorporate dynamic content into your own email marketing funnels. 

TED Talks Tailored to Your Preferences 

TED’s recommendations are an excellent example of dynamic content done right. Every week, the company sends a curated list of talks based on the user’s interests. So, each email newsletter is tailored to the recipient’s preferred topics, such as health, personal growth, society, and culture. 

This approach makes the content more relevant to individual readers, which means more traffic will land on TED’s website. 

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Medium’s Curated Reads to Spark Your Day

Medium, the online publishing platform, takes a similar approach with its daily digests. The platform’s users publish more than 40,000 articles every day. No one can sift through that many titles to find something they might enjoy reading. 

So, how does Medium get people to interact with the content? 

It collects your preferences during sign-up and fine-tunes them as you interact with the platform. Then, it uses those preferences to send you a daily list of the top articles you might be interested in. 

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Personalized Paths to Giving Back

This is one of the best examples of effective email marketing, especially among nonprofits, which are notorious for bad email marketing practices. 

VolunteerMatch smartly uses dynamic content to recommend volunteer opportunities tailored to the recipient’s interests and location. The aim is to connect potential volunteers with causes that resonate with them and are conveniently accessible. 

By personalizing the opportunities, VolunteerMatch increases the likelihood of recipients signing up. This way, it supports its network of nonprofit organizations and fosters a community of active volunteers.

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Tailoring Your Job Hunt with LinkedIn Alters

 

LinkedIn’s job alert emails target people on job hunts by sending them a curated list of relevant job openings across a geographic area. These emails simplify the job search process by pre-selecting opportunities that match the subscriber’s interests. 

LinkedIn’s goal is to streamline the job-hunting experience, increase platform engagement, and promote their premium service.

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Your SEO Scorecard with the Google Search Console 

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free service that helps website owners monitor their site’s performance in Google Search results. 

The platform sends a monthly personalized performance report to website owners. While the previous examples of dynamic content focused on marketing or service offerings, GSC directly reports user-specific data, such as website clicks and impressions. 

The screenshot above only shows part of the report. The recipient also sees their top-ranking pages, most relevant keywords, and potential technical issues. The email aims to engage website owners by summarizing their site’s search performance and encouraging them to use GSC to improve their SEO.

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ClickUp WrapUp: Unveiling Your Productivity Story

ClickUp, the productivity and project management platform, took a playful approach to data personalization with its “ClickUp WrapUp 2023” email campaign. The email invites users to review their yearly productivity on the platform. 

Unlike the straightforward analytics in GSC, ClickUp entices users with the promise of revealing their “productivity persona,” a fun, gamified twist on year-end summaries. So, technically, this campaign doesn’t use conventional dynamic content, but it uses personalization in a creative way. 

The goal is to increase user engagement by offering a personalized summary of their activity. I turned out to be a Gossip Queen because I used the @mention feature more than anything. 

Here’s a summary of real-world examples to illustrate the versatility and impact of dynamic content in email marketing.

Platform	How it uses dynamic content	Why it works
TED	Curated talks based on interests	Increased relevance Higher engagement Promotes discoverability
Medium	Tailored article recommendations	Time-saving Enhances user experience Drives traffic to the website
VolunteerMatch	Localized volunteer opportunities	Increases matches  Improves click-through rates Encourages platform usage
LinkedIn	Job alerts based on user preferences and location	Targeted job listings Direct and actionable Encourages platform use
Google Search Console	Personalized website performance reports	Data-driven insights User engagement Improves decision-making
ClickUp	Year-end summaries with a playful twist on user activity	Enhances user experience Increases retention Use gamification

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4+5 Reasons to Integrate Dynamic Content into Your Emails 

Dynamic content is a powerful tool for creating meaningful connections with your audience. Rather than casting a wide net with broadcast messages, it lets you address your subscribers with precision and personal touch. 

This approach brings plenty of advantages to your email marketing efforts, including these ones: 

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1. Higher Engagement

Dynamic content email is personalization at its peak. You send each subscriber exactly what they need. 

This will raise the chances of readers finding your content valuable. Instead of skimming and moving on, they’re more likely to click through, watch videos, read articles, and even respond to calls to action. 

Over time, users learn to expect that level of personalization and become more engaged because your brand consistently delivers content that matches their evolving interests. 

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2. Better User Experience

Users interact with your brand in different ways. Sending them dynamic emails will show them that you care about their needs. They’ll see that you’re aware of and value every interaction they make with your brand. 

Plus, personalization through dynamic content helps reduce the noise of irrelevant content. So, instead of having to sift through a one-size-fits-all email, your users can immediately focus on what’s relevant to them, which saves time and reduces frustration.

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3. Higher Conversion Rates 

A personal touch ensures that offers, products, or services featured in an email are relevant to the recipient. So, they’re more likely to respond positively and take your desired action. For example, a user who frequently browses romance novels is more likely to make a purchase if they receive an email promoting a Jane Austin book. 

Ultimately, by reducing the friction between desire and action, dynamic content makes it easy for users to make decisions

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4. More Efficient Processes 

Crafting emails that cater to every individual customer is counter-productive and time-consuming. With dynamic content, instead of creating a separate campaign for each segment, you craft one for your entire subscriber base and change only parts of your email. This saves your team a lot of time and effort. 

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5 Extra Benefits of Dynamic Email Content 

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Parts of Dynamic Email Content

Your customer data can help you customize your email content in a variety of ways. You can personalize just about any part of your email. 

The easiest and most common idea is to retrieve the recipient’s name from their profile and embed it into the email using a merge field. But your options are much more varied. Let’s go over a few ideas. 

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Subject Line 

A catchy subject line is key in drawing the reader’s attention and increasing open-rates. If it speaks to the recipient’s needs and preferences, there’s a higher chance that they open your email. 

Use this opportunity to give your readers a hint of what’s inside the email and how it can benefit them on a personal level. 

If a recipient recently browsed a specific product or service, mentioning it in the subject line can re-spark their interest. For example , “John, take another look at the gaming laptop you loved.” Tailoring the subject line based on the recipient’s location can also make the email more relevant. For example, “Special weekend deals just for our Chicago customers!”

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Email Body 

This is where you can get the most creative and deliver content fine-tuned to your subscribers’ preferences. You can send them welcome messages, product recommendations, tutorials, how-tos, guides, or thank-you notes, to show you care about them and bring them value. 

If you run a service-based business, you can provide personalized tips or insights based on the subscriber’s past activities. For example, a fitness app might send workout suggestions based on the user’s exercise history, or a financial service might offer tailored advice based on the user’s investment choices.

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CTAs

No matter how engaging your body is, it’s nothing if it doesn’t lead to a follow-up behavior, preferably sales. You need to seal the deal with an enticing call-to-action link to make the email campaign worthwhile.

Writing a personalized CTA increases the chances of the reader doing what you want. When you have a good grip on your audience’s likes and dislikes, you know how to entice them to do your desired action. And it can be easier than customizing the other parts because you can go with the main body’s flow and ask the reader to do something related. 

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Sign offs

Your email sign-off allows you to wrap the message in a consistent flow. Although it may be more rigid than other parts, you can use many customizing options to make it part of your dynamic content. The main body of the email can help you come up with a relevant sign-off. 

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Visuals 

Not every email consists of just text and copy. Many businesses, especially e-commerce brands, use visuals like images, videos, or GIFs to recommend products. 

You can also use infographics and videos to train and guide your customers. Sending customized visuals can increase your customer loyalty by heaps and bounds.  

Visuals can stir emotions in readers that texts can’t. Plus, they’re more appealing and easily noticeable. So, there’s a higher chance that your readers will engage with them. 

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How to Create an Email with Dynamic Content 

Dynamic content can be turned on or off depending on when/if you want to use it. Rather than having to type separate emails for everyone in your contact list, dynamic content allows you to change specific aspects depending on the group you’re sending it to.

1. Collect data. 
2. Segment your contacts. 
3. Design your email template. 
4. Create content variations for different segments. 
5. Preview and test your email. 

Let’s consider each step in more detail. 

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Collect Data

Personalization starts with data. It gives you everything you need to know about their preferences, demographics, behaviors, and activities. Depending on your business, different data may be relevant for using dynamic email content. 

For example, if you’re an e-commerce company, knowing what products each customer prefers is essential. But a business with a B2B strategy should know more about the audience’s industry or organizational structure to send them the right content. 

You can collect data in different ways and through different stages of the customer journey. The most common method is surveys. You can give your subscribers questions to answer when signing up for your emails or after making a purchase. 

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Segment Your Contacts 

Now that you have enough data, you should categorize your audience accordingly. First, you should decide on relevant categories for your business. Do you want to segment your audience based on their gender? Age? Shopping preferences? Or location? 

Here’s a rundown of the ways you can segment your groups and send dynamic content based on these segments. 

Segmentation criteria	Example	Description
Occasions	BirthdaysHolidaysMilestones Season and weather	Sending content or recommending products to celebrate a customer’s birthday or anniversary
Customer Data	LocationDemographics Customer behavior	Recommending products or sending tailored content based on the customer’s location, gender, or preferences
Products	Abandoned cartsPrevious purchasesPopular products	Recommending related products based on previous purchases or popular products on your website

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Design Your Email Template

You need a consistent layout that can adapt to different types of content while maintaining a coherent brand identity. The template will remain the same, but specific HTML elements will change based on the recipient’s data. 

So, your template needs distinct HTML blocks or sections to display the dynamic content. 

Your email marketing solution should give you the tools you need. Most platforms have text editors that let you send mass personalized emails using merge fields that pull data from each user’s profile. 

There are also drag-and-drop editors that allow you to assemble your email layout without technical skills. They’re ideal for creating modular designs and placeholder areas for dynamic content. 

Finally, your template should be responsive, meaning it adjusts seamlessly across different devices and screen sizes. If you’re using a template provided by your email marketing software, you probably don’t have much to worry about. But if you’re using a custom template, test it on multiple devices. 

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Create Content Variations 

Create specific content for each segment. Again, your email marketing platform plays a big role here. It should give you conditional content blocks that display based on segmentation rules. 

You also need a robust library where you can store and manage different content variations. 

Finally, consider whether you need to pull data from a different application or database, like your CRM or CMS. In this case, you’ll need integration capabilities or API access, and hooking things up might need a bit of technical expertise. 

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Preview and Test Your Email 

Before hitting the send button, make sure everything is working as intended. Check whether the dynamic elements are loading correctly. 

Also, test your content on multiple email clients and devices to ensure visual consistency. Once you’re confident that everything looks and functions as expected, send it out to your subscribers. 

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Getting the Most out of Your Dynamic Email Campaigns 

We’ve covered a lot of details so far, but there’s always room for fine-tuning.

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Next-Level Email Marketing with Campaign Refinery 

With your newfound understanding of dynamic content, the next piece of the puzzle is choosing a platform that makes personalization straightforward and effective. 

Curious about how we do it?