Adding dynamic content sections to your e-mail campaigns
What is Dynamic Content?
Dynamic Content allows you to setup a single e-mail campaign, but have different sections shown to recipients as required.
This would be useful if, for example, you were sending a offers newsletter and you had a special offer which was only available to registered members. Instead of creating two seperate campaigns you could create one, but add some special code into the campaign content which will only show your special offer to the correct recipients.
How do I setup Dynamic Content within Suite26?
You can add dynamic content to any campaign within Suite26. First, create your campaign in the in the normal way or select an existing one that you wish to add dynamic content to.
When you are in the campaign overview screen you will see an area labelled Dynamic Content. This area will list any sections which have been created for the campaign and will also allow you to add new sections.
After clicking on the Add Dynamic Content Section link you will be taken to another screen which is very similar to the screen where you add your Primary Content. Towards the top of the screen you will see a brief overview of the campaign you are working with so that you always know where you area. Underneath that you will find two fields which you must complete.
You should give your section an ID. This must contain letters, numbers and hyphens only. Keep it simple as you will need to refer back to it at a later date.
Also give your section a meaningful description. This will be seen only by you and helps you to identify sections easily.
Next, you need to create the content for this section. If you have set your campaign to be Plain Text Only then you will only see the Plain Text Content tab, otherwise you will see both as in the screenshot above.
Enter the content for this section. This can be a simple or as complicated as you require. You can still insert links, images, tables etc as well as Special Links and Personalisation Tags.
When you have finished creating the content for your section, just click the Save & Exit button and you will taken back to the campaign overview screen. You should now see your section appearing in the box labelled Dynamic Content.
Repeat this process for any other sections you want to create. For our example we'll pretend we have two sections, one with 'Golf Special Offers' and one with 'Fishing Special Offers'.
How do I make Dynamic Content appear in my campaign?
Now you have created your content section(s) you will want them to appear in your campaign.
All you need to do is insert a special piece of code into the Primary Content of your campaign:
{SECTION($golf-offers)}At send time the above piece of code would be replace by the content from the section with the ID 'golf-offers'.
When you are editing your Primary Content you will find a handy Insert Section facility just underneath the content fields. This makes it easy for you to add in the section tags as described above without having to remember the syntax and section IDs.
To make full use of Dynamic Content sections you will want to combine them with the powerful 'IF' logic that Suite26 allows you to use.
To go back to our example, let's say we are sending a special offers newsletter for a sporting goods store. Our newsletter will contain 4 generic offers which all of our recipients get to see, but the top offer in the newsletter will be either an offer for golf clubs or fishing rods, depending on what we know our recipients prefer.
The example assumes that we have a custom field in our database called 'sportspref' and all of our contacts have this field populated with either 'Golf' or 'Fishing'.
Now, in the Primary Content we place the following 'IF' logic around the tags for our Dynamic Content sections:
*|IF:{FIELD($c-sportspref)}=Golf|*{SECTION($golf-offers)}*|ELSEIF:{FIELD($c-sportspref)}=Fishing|*{SECTION($fishing-offers)}*|ENDIF|*
It may look a bit complicated but it will make sense once you've done it a couple of times.
At send time, the code above will retrieve the value of the custom field called 'sportspref' for each recipient. If the value of that field is 'Golf' it will include the content of the 'golf-offers' dynamic content section and if it's 'Fishing' it will include the content of the 'fishing-offers' section. In the above example, if the value of the custom field called 'sportspref' is neither 'Golf' or 'Fishing' then nothing will be included.
Your Primary Content section, may now look something like this:
Obviously your newsletter would probably contain images and styles which would make it look much more appealing, but this is just an example after all!
As well as putting Dynamic Content sections in between 'IF' logic it is also possible to place, text , images, links etc in between. For example:
*|IF:{FIELD($firstname)}=John|*Your name IS John
*|ELSE|*
Your name IS NOT John
*|ENDIF|*
Sending your campaign with Dynamic Content
You send your campaign in exactly the same way as you normally would. The fact your campaign contains Dynamic Content sections and/or 'IF' logic does not matter.
The only thing you should pay more attention to is testing your campaign to ensure the output is correct for all the possible recipient permutations.
Going back to our example above, we would test our campaign by ensuring we send a preview to ourselves with the 'sportspref' field set to both 'Golf' and 'Fishing' so we can see what each type of recipient would receive.
This all sounds too complicated to me!
It's not really that complicated, but then again it will not be of use to everybody. Some users may find it easier just to create seperate campaigns and split their contact lists, but for others this is a very powerful and useful feature.
As always, if you need help with this or any other features please drop us a line.