It’s astounding to realise that while 95% of marketers and executives* believe in the value of personalisation, just a residual percentage use dynamic content for a personalised experience. (* stats by Dynamic Yield)
We live in a time and era where technology and tools are somewhat accessible for small and medium enterprises to big corporations.
The rapid pace of progress has made these technological advances cost-effective for any player to take advantage of them to deliver a great digital experience to their audience.
However, even though the technology and tools have evolved rapidly, the same didn’t happen with marketing and C-level management. The adoption of these tools by the majority of the brands online is very shy.
In fact, only 6% of companies* are truly capable of consolidating data into a single customer view to deliver personalised experiences across channels. (*stats by Dynamic Yield)
Why Dynamic Content seems a mirage for most SME brands
Marketer teams and management get used to the idea that this kind of personalisation level or digital experience is only at the disposal of the big budgets. That might be the case a few years ago. Not any more.
At ZOPPLY, we’ve implemented dozens of dynamic content technology for several small and medium enterprises within our monthly plans without “breaking the bank”.
But more than think about the investment you need to do, think about the return of that investment. What do you think would be the increase in sales or customer retention if your website changes according to each individual?
Imagine that for a minute.
Have you ever felt when you reached a website that everything seems to be tailor-made for you? The picture to which you could relate to, the headline and text that resonated with you.
That might not be a lucky breakthrough. It can be due to dynamic content technology that changed according to what the tracking can see about your interests, provenance or personality.
Wait. Before you start to feel like you’re in a Big Brother, get over it. Yes, you are. And for quite some time.
Obviously that you can and should protect your privacy, but there are some things that you can still do that doesn’t affect your privacy.
Dynamic Content on a Private World
In order to change your content dynamically to answer your visitor’s interests, you need to measure something out of them.
However, depending on the grade of information you can obtain from each visitor, you have more or fewer variables to deal with. For instance, if you still don’t identify this visitor, you can’t treat them by name or history of behaviour or purchases.
There is still dynamic content that you can use, even when you don’t have this kind of insight. You have some things that you can use as pointers and triggers that change the content accordingly. For instance, you know the source URL from where they came from. Eventually, you know their IP address (geo-location), browser and operating system.
Can you imagine what you can do with these insights?
Let’s give you a practical example of a dynamic content approach with only these trackings.
Someone reached out to your website coming from a syndicated article on a partner website. You know that the IP places that person in London, United Kingdom and uses a Safari browser on iOS. Some systems can even know what device version they’re using.
With that information, you can create a personalised experience for your visitor using dynamic content that changes according to these insights.
You can place a picture of someone in a London landscape using an iPhone to browse the web, and you can even change that picture according to the time of day they’re visiting—morning, mid-day, afternoon, etc.
And that’s just a picture. Also, the headline, text and links can change accordingly.
Dynamic Content for Customer Journeys Workflows
One of the significant challenges that every marketing team had was to create messaging and content that could resonate with each customer journey steps.
Without using a dynamic content approach, you could end up creating many pages to tackle every variable. That wouldn’t be an issue if that didn’t affect your website’s navigation and reach the content they’re looking for more easily.
When you use a dynamic content approach, you can imagine a more seamless path between the starting point until they’re ready to engage. Because you’re creating variables IF/THEN/ELSE to deliver an outstanding and personalised experience.
Accenture states that 91% of consumers say that they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and relevant recommendations if you need a stimulus to start doing this. Hint: personalised experience.
If you need another reason, Adobe claims that 66% of consumers say that encountering content that isn’t personalised would stop them from purchasing. Can you imagine that? Just a tiny percentage of visitors usually end up converting. That means that you need to use all advantages at your disposal to make the most of it.
How can you implement Dynamic Content on web properties?
There are several technology providers with reasonable solutions for any case scenario. Of course, there’s also a solution for every budget.
The more powerful tools can still cost thousands of euros or dollars per month, but there are also more reasonable solutions for medium and small budgets, as mentioned earlier.
One of the significant challenges that every marketing team had was to create messaging and content that could resonate with each customer journey steps.
Questions you may ask to find the best dynamic content solution for your brand.
What are the variables and filters you can use per piece of content?
There’s a number of possibilities as mentioned above. However, some tools don’t allow the full spectrum of variables in some parts of the content—for instance, images.
What are the third-party integrations available?
It’s a great advantage to integrate with tools that you already use to connect with your audience—for instance, social networks, email marketing platforms, CRM, etc. That can enrich the source of information that each dynamic content can have to adapt to each user.
How is the usability of the platform?
It doesn’t matter how powerful is a platform if you end up wasting time trying to use it. Sometimes, a more lightweight but user friendly platform can be better to perform your strategy.
Can it be used with your current web properties format?
Depending on what kind of website or landing pages you might have, it may or may not integrate well with it. If you have a WordPress website or other CMS, it may not run that particular platform.
Does it offer upgrades?
It might make sense if you want to start with a lightweight version to test the ground and see real benefits before jumping into the full scale of the features available.
How’s the customer support process?
It’s when you’re in trouble that you will value having fast and reliable customer support. Imagine that you’re running a campaign and something doesn’t work. You want to fix that ASAP.
What are all the costs?
Sometimes we just see the pricing chart, and we don’t realise that some hidden costs might be to accomplish what you want. For instance, a key feature costs and an additional fee to make it available or for this to work, you need a third-party integration that costs an additional monthly charge.
What are the statistics it provides?
It’s imperative to understand what’s happening with the several dynamic content versions and the conversion/engagement rates you’re getting with each version performance. It doesn’t need to be something that the platform provides, but you need to be able to monitor it with your Analytics tool. If you can’t, you’re flying blind here.
Is it SEO friendly?
One of the benefits of the written word and content on your websites is that it can rank well for search engines. When we have dynamic content, depending on the way it “prints” the content to the search bots, it can work to your benefit or… not. It’s important to see the reviews and supporting documents about this topic before making your decision.
Do ZOPPLY plans support dynamic content?
Yes, of course. Most of our clients already use this feature to stand out from the competition and offer an enjoyable personalised experience to their audience. Better yet, with our full-service approach, you don’t need to do a thing. We do it all for you.
Final remarks
Take a moment and look at today’s date. Don’t you think that it’s about time that you use the current technology to offer the best possible experience to your audience? It’s not a matter of budget anymore. It’s about decision making, priority definition and strategy.
In other words, there are no more excuses. You don’t use it because you don’t want to.
If you need assistance in implementing dynamic content into your web properties, contact our team. We’re here to help you.
