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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[JimmySpencer_ · Accepted solution]

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

[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).