Creating {{dynamic content}} in your marketing emails: Why and how?

Receiving a canned or boilerplate email message is not nearly as impactful as opening your inbox and seeing an email that seems to be written just for you. Personalization drives engagement, heightened engagement improves the impact of your sales and marketing pursuits.

That’s the whole theory behind Dynamic content as a method of making your sales and marketing messages more impactful without spending an abundance of time personalizing emails for each user. And you don’t even need to know how to code to create Dynamic content in your emails.

What is Dynamic Content?

Dynamic content is used to personalize emails by merging information from a recipient’s contact record (like their name), to place special links, and to place info and links from the content settings. Dynamic content can go anywhere in the body of your email message and some dynamic values can be used in the header fields (the subject, from address, and from name).

Dynamic content is resolved just before the message is sent to that target individual, so in an email, it’s represented as two curly brackets boxing in that content. Here is a pretty simple and straightforward example:

Hello {{contact.firstname}}!

This will send as “Hello Anna!” or whatever appears in the contact’s “First Name” field within Dynamics 365 Marketing. But {{dynamic.content}} can be way more than just your contact or subscriber’s first name – more on that in a bit!

Dynamic content stays in this curly bracket form until the email is about to be sent – then a query is triggered to gather and enter that info automatically before sending. This is one reason why testing your emails will be important – to ensure you have set up dynamic content correctly and it won’t fail on you.

How to set up Dynamic Content

You have a default Content Settings record from the out-of-the-box marketing app, which includes a subscription center link, a forward-to-a-friend link, social media links, your address, and other info you will then be able to place as dynamic values into emails. You can also edit the defaults and create new settings yourself.

It is in the customer journey that you establish which Content Settings will be followed by that particular journey (the default if you don’t change it). So each message in a journey will use the same record, which is first evaluated at the send time of the first message. If you edit a Content Settings record when a customer journey using that record is running, the journey will use the latest values in that record for all pending and future messages.

To access content settings records, go to Marketing > Marketing Templates > Content Settings. On this list page, you can view, sort, search, and filter the list to find specific records and use the buttons on the command bar to add or remove a record (as you can on any other list page).

To create a new record, select “New.” A form will open and this is where you enter all your key data, like your address, social URLs, subscription center, forward-to-a-friend, and if this should be the default or not. You can even use dynamic content in the address, subscription center, and forward to a friend fields. When finished, save and go live.

Inserting a dynamic value

After you’ve set up your content settings, you can insert a dynamic value. To do so, identify what it is you want to insert. If it’s a piece of text in the email, click where you want it to go, then click to “Personalization” in the text toolbox.

If you want to add a dynamic value to the email subject, from address, or from name, click into that part of the header and locate the brackets icon {}. Both this and the Personalization button lead to the same place, which is the “Content Assist” popout window.

In this window, you will choose between “Dynamic content” or “Static content.” If you choose Dynamic content, you have four options in the drop-down menu:

• Contact – Uses field values from the recipient’s contact record (for instance, a first name).
• ContentSettings – Uses a value from the content settings, like a social URL, an address, or a subscription center.
• FormDoiSubmission – Uses a dynamic field for form double opt-in. (This option doesn’t require any sort of relationship value.)
• Message – Uses info about the message itself. One of the more popular uses of “Message” is the option to open the email as a webpage.  

If you choose Static content, this content will be a fixed value no matter how or where it is placed in the email or to whom it is sent. You first select an entity (such as Account, Contact, Lead, Event) and then you select a specific record.

Static content is so called because it pulls content from a static record. Regardless of the contact receiving the email, a static content piece will always pull from the same specific record like an Event or Content Settings. But, it's included in the umbrella of Dynamic content because, if any changes are made to that static record (for instance, an event name is updated from "Welcome Webinar" to "Welcome to our Club Webinar"), that change will be reflected in the static content expression.

From this point, whether you chose dynamic or static content, you will go on to identify the relationship, which defines the related entity that you want to jump to, through which you can then select an entity to populate. For instance, you could choose Dynamic content > Contact, which would prompt you to select the relationship. You may want to jump to the account that the contact is under so you can use the Account Name in your dynamic content. (This would be handy if you want to refer directly to their place of work within the email.)

After selecting the relationship to that related entity and finding the field you want to use, the dynamic expression will appear as a preview, and if you’re satisfied, you can insert that content.

Here’s our example text from the above exercise and how it populates in a test email:

Expression:

Hello {{contact.firstname}}! What are your current restocking needs a {{contact.contact_account_parentcustomerid.name}}?

Example Email:

Hello Anna! What are your current restocking needs at Contoso?

One quick note: The “Relationship” field and the final expression look kind of goofy, and that has to do with the way the system shows the relationships between entities within the database, which we won’t dive into here. But if this expression looks confusing to you, that’s okay! Syvantis consultants can help you understand the relationships and expressions you will find yourself using according to your business needs. Connect with us if you want to discuss this further.

What can you do with {{dynamic content}}?

We’ll give you an inexhaustive list of examples, just a taste of what you can do when you use dynamic content in your emails or other messages in Dynamics 365 Marketing.

• Use the recipient’s first name and/or last name in your email salutation.
• You can insert the subscription center URL to allow users to “Unsubscribe from these emails” or “Change subscription settings.”
• Include a “forward to a friend” option, which will create a new web beacon and personalized redirect links for that new forwarded message.
• Allow the recipient to open the current email message in a web browser.
• Include the webinar URL for an event.
• Set the “From name” and “From address” within the email header to the owner of a contact record (assuming the recipient will recognize that person’s name) to improve open rates on the email.
• If the recipient is being sent a survey, or filled one out already, the title of that survey can be included in the text of a sentence.

Conditional statements vs. Conditional content

Conditional statements: A more advanced form of dynamic content is conditional statements that allow you to change certain wording in your email to target segments of your audience. This capability is available in both Outbound and Real-Time areas of Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Essentially, you are creating one email (that you can then use in one Customer journey), but you can include or exclude certain text depending on a certain segment or attribute of a contact. If you’ve used the “If/Then” tile in a Customer journey, this is somewhat the same concept, but to a smaller degree

An example: If you are sending an email about an event coming to a certain city, you may be emailing all contacts in that city and surrounding states. You can include a statement that if the contact is a VIP client, their email will include a plug for using a promo code to receive a discount on the event registration.

Or, if you want to personalize your email greeting based on the country the contact resides in to account for primary languages, decorum, and so forth, you can set different “Hello” lines according to those varied cultural standards.

Conditional content: And similarly named but available only in the Real-Time Marketing email designer, you can create conditional content. Essentially, you are creating one email (that you can then use in one Customer journey), but you can swap out certain things (text, an image, a link) depending on a certain segment or attribute of a contact. This is also (like with conditional statements) similar to an “if/then” directive.

You would want to use conditional content for larger, more involved changes, and you must create the email in the Real-Time area of D365 Marketing. An example of this might be if you are a retailer and have storefronts across the US. You’re hosting your yearly stockout sale at all stores. You can send a single email to all contacts who have purchased from you before, but you can swap out the storefront address and phone number depending on their local store. You could even include a photo of that storefront in the email and make that conditional in the same way, which could induce familiarity and drive visits to your store during that sale.

Creating conditional statements and conditional content happens within the email designer itself – conditional statements are made in a custom code block in Outbound or Real-Time areas, while conditional content can be created only in the Real-Time email designer by selecting the “Enable conditional content” option. Digging into the “how to” of these two types of conditional material in messages is a little outside the purview of this blog, but it’s good to know they are options to explore.

If you’re excited to implement dynamic content, conditional content, or conditional statements in your marketing messages but want a little help getting started, Syvantis is happy to help!