[Coffee Break] 08/23/23, 8am PST: Dynamic Content, Featuring Marketo Engage Champions!

[Jon_Chen]

Our fifth Community Coffee Break on Dynamic Content is now OVER. Thank you all for your amazing questions and we hope to see you at a future Coffee Break!

Elevate your marketing game with Dynamic Content! Join our exciting Coffee Break designed exclusively for marketing practitioners and unlock the power of personalized content delivery. In this lively Community Q&A session, we’ve partnered with Dynamic Content experts @JimmySpencer_ and @Corey_Bayless to dive into how Dynamic Content enables you to create engaging experiences across various assets, including emails, landing pages, and snippets.

You’ll be able to ask Jimmy and Corey real-world questions on how to configure dynamic sections in your emails, landing pages, and snippets, allowing you to deliver personalized promotions, targeted offers, and captivating visuals.

This text-only event takes place here on the Marketing Nation Community. Post your burning questions, hot tips, key takeaways, and let’s chat about them! Our experts will be interacting live for that hour, but the conversation can continue! 

For some guidance, here are some sample topics you can ask these experts about:

• What are the real benefits to dynamic content?
• What are some use cases for utilizing dynamic content?
• What is the typical performance when utilizing dynamic content?
• How does dynamic content help the customer and the Marketo builder?
• What resources can I enable dynamic content in Marketo?
• What are my limitations on Segmentations and how a Marketo asset can be built? My organization wants to commit to personalizing our marketing efforts. Which skill sets should we be investing in for our current and future employees?
• We don't have many technical resources internal to the business. What's the best path forward so that we can benefit from dynamic content?
• We've had some difficulty reporting on our results with dynamic content. Do you have any suggestions?

Note: If you cannot make the live Q&A, you can still ask your questions NOW and it will be answered in the order that it was received.

Requirements to Participate

• Must be signed into the Community during the 1-hour period.
• Must post an Adobe Marketo Engage question or comment on Dynamic Content.
• Must tag either or both Champs in your question (@JimmySpencer_, @Corey_Bayless).
• THAT'S IT! *(think of this as the Marketing Nation Community equivalent of an AMA, (“Ask Me Anything”), and bring your best speed-typing game).
• Please note this is a TEXT-ONLY event, meaning that there will be no webinar, video call, or recording. All questions and answers will occur on this thread!
  • During the live session, be sure to REFRESH the page so that you can see the latest questions and responses.

[Jon_Chen]

Hey Everyone,

The Coffee Break is now OVER. Thank you all for your amazing questions and a special shoutout to our experts @Corey_Bayless and @JimmySpencer_ for leading this session. Please stay tuned for more Coffee Breaks in the near future, we have TWO more Coffee Breaks next month - Dynamic Chat on September 7th and Engagement Canvas (TBD).

[JimmySpencer_ · Accepted solution]

Thanks for coming to our coffee break! @Corey_Bayless and I had a great time fielding your questions. Until next time.

[SGarg_YU]

We have started using Dynamic Chat for our site visitors. There is a use-case where we want to allow users to be able to book appointment with their sales owner using Calendly. In our Marketo instance, we have utilized snippets to create email Call-To-action buttons that populates the unique Calendly URL for each lead using dynamic content. I was wondering if we can use this snippet in our Dynamic Chat as well. 

As of now I only see option of Appointment booking through Google/Microsoft cals. Could you help us find a solution? Thank you 🙂

[JimmySpencer_]

Hi @SGarg_YU!

That's a great question. Dynamic Chat is still very new and I think we're all testing the possibilities right now. To your question, in order to pull this off you would need to get creative. You would essentially have to have the customer "book" without telling them they're booking (so it's not confusing for them) so that you could THEN send a "confirmation" email that is actually just an email with a calendly link. A little more detail below:

1. Write the personalized calendly link to the person profile in Marketo so that it can be used as a token.
2. Sufficiently alter your chat flow so that you can send your "confirmation" email without the customer being confused.
3. Send the email with the calendly link so the customer can sign up for their appointment.

This may be difficult to pull off at this time. In the future things should be a little easier in terms of customization.

[larsonian]

Historically our emails have been hardcoded top to bottom, but we are looking to create modular templates that are more flexible and include dynamic content segments. 

We have a segment that will be used in a number of emails. Would you recommend re-building the dynamic content within each email template, including adding the specific content for that specific email within the template editor? Or another option would be create a single snippet that contains dynamic content with a token for each Segment value. That single snippet could be added to multiple emails with the actual content for the specific email inserted via  token values. 

For example a segment with the labels "Leads" , "Owners", "Champions", etc. would be added to a Snippet. Each Segment's content, would include  {{my.LeadsContent}}, {{my.OwnersContent}}, {{my.ChampionsContent}}, etc. Then on the email template we would insert the shared snippet and assign content for that specific email to each token. 

[Corey_Bayless]

Thank you for the question, unfortunately you can’t build emails pre dynamic, the email template will need to be built, then you can make each section dynamic within the cloned email by the section through the Marketo editor ux. Templates should be generic with the ability to add content to all the underlying drafts that are using that framework. The goal is to get away from hardcoded, and try to get to a code free implementation.  Drag and drop content with html and css styling predefined in the template code.  Using rich text is also a good way to create no code email builds.

Make sure when you are building your snippets to match segmentation with the tokens.  I like to append my tokens with a value to indicate which segment it qualifies for.  Tokens need to be coordinated, if a token doesn’t exist, then you will end up with missed values, so any snippet use needs to have folder tokens that populate the target values.  This can get messy if it is not thought through.

[cmprevite]

Hi,

Thanks for your time! @JimmySpencer_ @Corey_Bayless !

I never thought that maintaining mutually exclusive segmentations for my company made sense, just due to industry and business particularities (i.e. things like language, region, product interests, etc. just wouldn't make sense for us). Are there use case for dynamic content outside of segmentation? And if not, do you recommend any kind of segmentation that might be lesser known/less obvious that we should potentially reconsider to make use of dynamic content?

[JimmySpencer_]

Hi @cmprevite!

That's a great question. Firstly, you cannot run dynamic content without segmentations because that is the logic they are based on. Regarding using segmentations, what you may run into is having to create extremely robust segments to reflect all possible combinations. For example if you want to have a segmentation based on 3 variables (industry, region, Job Level) you will quickly realize that the number of combinations will become staggering as the number of values increase.

For this reason (among others) many organizations choose to use velocity scripts which are based on any combination of profile data and/or custom object data. This opens up a world of possibilities and flexibility.

[Yashwith]

What are some best practices or pro tips when it comes to dynamic content on e-mails?

[Corey_Bayless]

The audience is the number one reason to use segmentation and segments.  There are lots of different ways to segment your audience, I like to find similarities in data, persona, job title, industry etc. 

Also, it is important to think about how common this audience is being emailed.  If you find yourself building emails for this target audience frequently, segmentation can help speed up the time to deliver curated content.  I think of it as a one email to many audience types.

Also think about the value add of the email you are building and how it relates specifically to that audience.  What makes this segment unique vs is the next segment. Data on the lead record is how to define those differences.

[JimmySpencer_]

Hey Folks! Jimmy and Corey are on and ready for your questions!

[Zoe_Forman]

Hi @JimmySpencer_ @Corey_Bayless 

I'm working in EMEA and work in upto 12 languages and have sub-region segmentation.

I use Dynamic content emails using segmentation.

At EMEA Adobe Summit, I was involved in a couple of sessions around Adobe WorkFront as I am looking for efficiency and better Email workflows, which would include audience targeting, translations, creation, approval, delivery and reporting.

I'd like to understand how WorkFront could work with Dynamic content, specifically in multiple language segmentation.

Thanks, Zoe

[Zoe_Forman]

Hi @JimmySpencer_ @Corey_Bayless 

I'm working in EMEA and work in upto 12 languages and have sub-region segmentation.

I use Dynamic content emails using segmentation.

At EMEA Adobe Summit, I was involved in a couple of sessions around Adobe WorkFront as I am looking for efficiency and better Email workflows, which would include audience targeting, translations, creation, approval, delivery and reporting.

I'd like to understand how WorkFront could work with Dynamic content, specifically in multiple language segmentation.

Thanks, Zoe

[Jon_Chen]

Hi @Zoe_Forman It looks like Jimmy responded to your question on the first page - you can view his response here. Let us know if you have any follow-up comments! Thanks.

[amiratf]

@JimmySpencer_, @Corey_Bayless I am new to dynamic content. Is the best way to get started to build our segments first? Is it easier to start with email or website dynamic content first? 

[JimmySpencer_]

Hi @amiratf!

In my opinion the easiest way to get started with dynamic content is through email. It is a little more intuitive (since most folks use email much heavier than web in their early learning stages). 

The dynamic content feature requires a segmentation so you must have your segmentations created first.  Be sure to brush up on the segmentation documentation to understand how they work.

Two quick notes on dynamic content/segmentations:

1. A person can only belong to one segment within a segmentation so you may have to account for variables in creative ways.
2. A dynamic content block can only use a single segmentation for it's output. Meaning a dynamic content block can't renders content based on (for example) an industry and a geography segmentation. You would have to choose one or the other. 

[Zoe_Forman]

Hi Jimmy & Corey @JimmySpencer_

This is my first Community Coffee break.

I added a question in the chat above - do I need to copy and add again?

Zoe

[Jon_Chen]

Hey @Zoe_Forman Thanks for joining us for your first Coffee Break! No worries on copying it again - Jimmy and Corey will answer it shortly!

[Zoe_Forman]

Hi @JimmySpencer_ @Corey_Bayless 

I'm working in EMEA and work in upto 12 languages and have sub-region segmentation.

I use Dynamic content emails using segmentation.

At EMEA Adobe Summit, I was involved in a couple of sessions around Adobe WorkFront as I am looking for efficiency and better Email workflows, which would include audience targeting, translations, creation, approval, delivery and reporting.

I'd like to understand how WorkFront could work with Dynamic content, specifically in multiple language segmentation.

Thanks, Zoe

[JimmySpencer_]

Hi @Zoe_Forman,

Your segmentations are ultimately based on the data in your system. So for workfront to effect change it would either have to directly push data into marketo (such as country and/or preferred language) OR it would have to inform middleware that would in turn push this data.

Outside of segmentations, there is room for email content generated via API but this may be a much heavier lift than is needed to achieve your outcomes.

[Zoe_Forman]

My question was more about sending dynamic content emails to multiple recipients to approve - based on language segmentation. Can WorkFront split down the previews by segmentation or would it have to send the whole email?
Thanks