April 2009

An introduction to dynamic content
There’s more to this powerful tool than just personalization Chris Carder

ast month, I was invited by the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA) to lead an industry roundtable for a group of forward thinking senior marketers who wanted to learn how to leverage dynamic content to advance their marketing goals. These sophisticated participants raised several practical questions that revealed the disparate definitions and misconceptions about a tool that can exert a powerful impact on customers. Consequently, I thought I would demystify this topic as part of my regular column.

Customers are increasingly demanding relevance and what is relevant for them is constantly evolving. Couple that expectation with the marketer’s need to cost effectively achieve significant results and dynamic content suddenly becomes a critical tool.

What is dynamic content? How is it different from personalized content?
For years, marketers have been applying different tools and technologies to personalize content. This has largely meant “dropping in” information from a handful of discrete data fields into formatted communication pieces so as to give the recipient the impression that he is recognized as unique. The perfect example is the traditional direct mail letter that incorporates the relevant salutation, first name, last name, job title, and address fields as well as the closing with a signature. Dynamic content goes well beyond leveraging isolated data fields or tweaking text.

In essence, dynamic content is content that is modified to suit each reader’s needs.  This individualized content is displayed in response to different contexts and/or conditions. For marketers, dynamic content provides the power to target specific, relevant offers and news, based on subscriber preferences, customer profile data or any business rule. For the customer, dynamic content means receiving relevant and timely information that is valued.

Developing dynamic content requires a two-pronged approach. Part one involves gathering and organizing variable customer data such as expressed customer preferences, actual customer behaviours, and customer profile attributes from any number of customer touch points. Part two consists of an automated process that, based on specific business rules, uniquely configures content that is individualized in its information, format, delivery, and timing so that recipients recognize it as valuable.

Personalization—which addresses only one aspect of relevance—is somewhat more static whereas dynamic content provides the opportunity to have a more complete one-to-one conversation with your client on a variety of levels.

Why should I leverage dynamic content? What are the benefits?
Customers are increasingly demanding relevance and that which is relevant for them is constantly evolving. Couple that expectation with the marketer’s need to cost effectively achieve significant results and dynamic content suddenly becomes a critical tool.

Dynamic content helps marketers measurably:

• Build stronger, more intimate relationships with customers and prospects;
• Streamline customer service and/or content production activities;
• Reduce response time; and ultimately,
• Increase revenue, retention and loyalty.
  

When should I use dynamic content? How do I know it is needed?
Implementing dynamic content can be the most cost-effective method of achieving any of the previously mentioned marketing goals when you are confronting one or more of the following challenges:

• A variety of products and/or services to offer
• A variety of product assets (images, descriptions, brands, prices, categories)
• Multiple sources of customer insights
• Multiple customer touch points (in-store, online, direct mail, call centre, mobile)
• Several concurrent or sequenced promotional campaigns
• Several strategic partners and/or locations-multiple customer segments

Who uses dynamic content effectively to achieve their marketing goals?
If you use dynamic content, you will outperform your competitors’ marketing campaigns. However, companies that already have a long history of maintaining a strong market position are also adopting dynamic content because they recognize its revenue-generating and cost-saving potential. For example, Air Canada’s impressive results with its popular e-mail newsletter webSaver® demonstrates how companies can cost effectively use dynamic content to achieve their most important marketing goals.

About webSaver
webSaver® is Air Canada’s weekly and tailored electronic newsletter that brings subscribers hot offers, the latest news and updates on the airline’s products and services.
The newsletter had been building its database of subscribers for three years when, after conducting some market and competitive analysis, Air Canada concluded a redesign was necessary to increase the publication’s subscriber retention and activity. Why? Because when these key performance indicators increase, so do revenues.

Working closely with ThinData to redesign the newsletter and leverage dynamic content, deployment and measurement strategy, Air Canada adopted a three-pronged approach:

Target product offerings based on each subscriber.
Provide each subscriber with the control to define key elements of their user experience.
Maintain an ongoing dialogue with the target audience to learn and adapt to their evolving preferences.

E-mail marketing program
At the core of the redesigned e-mail marketing program was an online “preference centre” that captured detailed information about each e-mail subscriber’s preferred travel experiences. Highly intuitive “customer choice tools” were also embedded in the webSaver® e-mail newsletter. These tools served as a bridge to the preference centre which provided subscribers the capacity to continuously refine the type of information they received from Air Canada about upcoming trips and offers.

Air Canada customers played an important role in shaping the webSaver® redesign. Specifically, Air Canada collected and integrated subscribers’ historic click through and conversion patterns. Today, customers continue to shape the program well after the design was completed, as their preferences and behaviours are continuously gathered and immediately reflected in subsequent e-mails.

The webSaver® redesign recognized the essential role that customers play in dictating the company’s communications. When it came to execution, Air Canada invested in a robust database that collects, analyzes and re-configures subscribers’ e-mails based on each customer’s unique preferences. The result has been the ability to make sense of the thousands of combinations when a subscriber chooses preferences for a home airport, local destinations, international destinations, “sun” destinations, departure dates and return dates. Moreover, sophisticated segmentation allows subscribers to receive information that is relevant to their location.

Results
Shortly after the dynamically generated webSaver® was launched, the number of unsubscribes dropped by more than 60 percent—a key measure of increased retention— equivalent to three times the original goal. At the same time, the webSaver® redesign saw a dramatic increase of subscriber activity that exceeded 20 percent during periods when subscriber activity is typically low. Finally, the redesign allowed Air Canada to live one of its core values. “Giving our clients control over their flying experience, one of our core brand messages, was hardwired into the newly designed webSaver®,” emphasizes Mark Sniderman, Air Canada’s manager of Marketing Communications for North America. “That’s why we are so excited that it has made a significant contribution to our marketing efforts.”
Visit www.AirCanada.com to enroll in webSaver® and discover for yourself how dynamic content provides customized and timely news and offers.

The overall value of dynamic content
If, like most senior marketers, you are running digital marketing campaigns and have identified distinct segments, you’ve established some of the foundations for an effective dynamic content process. The next step is to sit down with your IT department or trusted digital marketing advisor and develop a roadmap to ensure that you can optimally leverage your customer information and today’s technologies.

Chris Carder is president of e-mail service provider ThinData, a Transcontinental Company (www.thindata.com), and Canada’s leading authority and supplier of e-mail marketing technology, strategy and creative services. He can be reached at president@thindata.com.