Dynamic content - newbie. Each will have a different body

[TRXguy]

We're having a directed marketing campaign where we're going to give items and prices of products customers should buy.

Customer 1 might see:

Product ZZZ is $

Product YYY is $$

Customer 2 might see:

Product ABC is $$

Product DEF is $$$

Is this possible with this application?  Do we need to use the APIs?

[William_A]

Hello @TRXguy ,

Typically speaking, Dynamic Content is for small sections of an overall larger email - something like featuring different coupons based on interests, or having a small blurb of info in a different language. You'll need to make sure your contacts have corresponding tags / contact fields based on the products you want to feature for them. Using your earlier example, all contacts that need to see Product ZZZ and YYY need to be tagged as a 1-type customer - either through their tags, city, state, zip code, custom field, or something else. Any contacts not tagged in such ways won't see that content block. Any contacts that don't have applicable tags to any of your dynamic content blocks simply won't see any of them.

Make sure to go through this article on Dynamic Content, so you're getting a clear picture of how to set it up, and what you're needing from your contacts to advertise to them as desired.

If you're anticipating the majority of your email campaign's content being different between each subset of contacts, or you don't have your contacts' interests tagged in a way to make dynamic content work, sending separate emails may be the better solution. Split those contacts up into smaller lists based on their interests or what products you want to feature, create emails with the products and offers you want to highlight respective to the lists they're targeting, then send the emails to their respective lists.

[TRXguy]

Perhaps more clearly - every body in the email can be unique per customer.  No two emails will be the same is a possibility.  Sending separate emails was the plan.  I need to figure out how to automate that though with the content.

[Kyle_R]

Got it. The dynamic content options that William_D mentioned above are the best solution for truly dynamic blocks of an email (full control over all the content), but I agree with the caveats that he mentioned. It seems like due to the number of different variations that won't work well for you.

Some additional options that could possibly work: 

The first hurdle would be establishing an association between which product should go to which contact. You could do that by creating a custom field for something like "product name" and when you upload contacts you can include the custom field as a column in your spreadsheet so it gets applied to everyone at once. From your example, it sounds like price would be another field.

Once the custom field is established you can use it to insert as personalized content in the email. This works similar to how the dynamic greeting work, if you've ever used that feature. You can also use it in the subject line which is really nice.

Similarly, you can use dynamic links if you need to link back to the product in your store. This works best if the URL's all follow the same format such as mystore.com/shop/[PRODUCT_ID]  - Where product_id could be another custom field you upload. 

Not exactly what you asked for, but worth mentioning, if you have an e-commerce store through eBay, Etsy, Shopify, or Magento you can create segments of customers to mail to based on e-commerce behavior. Shopify is particularly good for the abandoned cart email feature. Even if you don't use one of those e-commerce stores, the segments feature is still something that could be nice to take advantage. If you go with the custom fields route, you could create a segment for everyone that has the same product in their custom field. That could be useful for an "X product is back in stock" email, or something similar. 

It's worth noting that the email body would be mostly the same, and you'd just replacing certain parts with the info specific to the content. Depending on how much variation you're expecting between each version, maybe this doesn't work well either. If you're not sure, I recommend using several internal company emails of colleagues and running a small test to see how it might work. Open to any additional questions or thoughts though.