Configuring dynamic content

Welcome to Adobe Campaign classic. In this module, we will be looking at how to configure dynamic content.

By at the end of the module, you will learn what dynamic content is, identify the types of dynamic content, and know how to compose dynamic content by creating and applying personalization blocks along with conditional statements in a delivery. In today’s climate, you won’t find much luck marketing something to someone who has no interest in what you’re offering. You want to be playing to their interests and make your content effective whilst being manageable. The more information you gather about your recipients the better you will be at targeting relevant content at them. Given the variety of recipients you will encounter, you will have to create multiple pieces of marketing content, potentially hundreds, to appeal to the variety of people, which is wasteful and time-consuming. This is where dynamic content comes into play. Using dynamic content in Adobe Campaign, you can leverage tools within your content delivery creator and customize it to change content based on attributes of your recipients. Dynamic content is more relevant, meaning you aren’t marketing unwanted or unneeded products or services. It is more appealing making it so your content will actually be read, and more personalized, resulting in the recipient not being like they are receiving content from a machine. To make use of dynamic content within the HTML of your email delivery, you must use JavaScript constructs in order for campaign to compute personalized data. There are two ways for embedding JavaScript in HTML. The first was covered in another video and is used purely to return data. It’s great for using a recipient’s name and other identifying attributes that can be used in an email to seem more personal. The second is used to evaluate JavaScript and most commonly used with conditional statements. This construct is similar to the first example except it doesn’t have the equal sign in the directive. For example, you can use these to check a recipient’s gender and then based on the result, only show specific content that is relevant to these recipients such as a link to men’s wear or women’s wear. If you want to take it a step further and apply large scale personalization with easy reusability, you should opt for personalization blocks. These are effectively templates that are dynamic, personalized, and contains rendering code that can be added to all deliveries. You can use them to add headers, images, basic copyright content, and much more. You use the JavaScript construct similar to the personalization field, except you use the at symbol instead of an equals. To import to these in personalization blocks within your delivery, you use the JavaScript construct similar to the personalization field, except you use the at symbol instead of an equals. Adobe Campaign comes with some out of the box personalization blocks such as greetings, a mirror page, and subscription links. With these in place, it significantly helps reduce the marketers time by only focusing on the content and lets certain personalization blocks handle the reusable content. Now follow along as we are able to create our own personalization block and use it in a delivery. To create a personalization block, navigate to the Explorer, go to Resources, Campaign Management, and Personalization Blocks. Here are all the out of the box personalization blocks and the option to create our own. Click the new button to get a window where you can create this new content.

We will now create our own block that will provide a link to register or login depending on if the recipient is a member or not.

I will just move this higher up so we can see better. First let’s change the label to Member Block and change the internal name as well.

Make sure to check this following tick box. This box enables rendering in either HTML or text depending on a recipient’s mailbox headings. It’s best practice to enter our HTML via the source tab. You can switch to the HTML tab for a better view of the layout and play back and forth with both views. Now we will insert a conditional statement from this dropdown.

Go to Conditional Content and select If. You now have an if statement inserted and need to enter the value you want to evaluate. Select the menu drop down again.

Go to Recipients, and here you have a select few of the attributes. To see all of them click Other, and you can search or navigate to find the attribute you want.

For us, we want membership level and it’s inserted into the text editor for us. Now, a lot of these attributes on the recipient are expressed as numbers in the database. And the value zero is used to represent a recipient who is not a member. Now, if a recipient is not a member, it will render the content with this conditional block. So let’s enter single quote, zero single quotes.

Now we will enter our contents in this block.

Let’s write the word register.

We will now highlight the word, and select this hyperlink button. We can now enter our registration URL in this text field. For now I will just enter adobe.com for the purposes of this demo and I will change the targets to open in a new window.

Press Add to complete. You can now see the basic HTML has been added to your source code. You can go to the HTML view to get a rendered view of your hyperlink.

We also want to provide a login link to the recipients who are members. To do this, we expand on the condition by placing an else statement meaning if their membership level is not zero, meaning they are a member, then render this portion of the content instead. Like before, we’ll go to this dropdown, Conditional Content, and select Else. Like before, we’ll enter our content, we’ll say login, highlight the text, do hyperlink, I’ll enter adobe.com for now and the target will be a new window, press Add. We now have two conditions. One checking if the recipient is not a member therefore rendering a hyperlink to register, and the second condition is all other members regardless of their level, and providing them with a login. Lastly, we would like to provide a special login link for our premium members. We need to add an else if condition checking for these members. Between the if and the else, we’ll place this condition.

We’ll go to this dropdown, Conditional Content, to else if.

We now need to insert the member select field again so you have this dropdown and recipients, membership level is here, and it’s at the top level because it’s our most recently used attribute, and the value we need to change.

In this case, we will be looking for the value four which is the number used to represent premium members.

Now we need to change the content.

We’ll say premium login, and do the hyperlink.

Now we can render a special login for our premium members.

I will now clean up the constructs in order for them to work so just delete a couple of these derivatives.

You now have created your first personalization block using conditional statements. Now that we have created our personalization block, let’s apply it to an email delivery to see it in action. Go to Deliveries and let’s click Create to create a basic email delivery.

In our HTML content, we will add the out-of-box greeting personalization block followed by our custom personalization block. Go to the dropdown, go to Include, and go to Other right at the bottom.

This brings up a window that has all personalization blocks. Let’s select Greetings, and let’s do the same again for our personalization block.

We called it member block, so let’s add this in. Now you have two blocks included in your HTML content. We are now able to preview this as we’ve covered before.

Now let’s select some recipients and see how the content is rendered based on the different types.

Here, we have a registered link showing that this recipient is not a member.

We’ll go to a different recipient.

Well see, we are greeted with the login hyperlink meaning this recipient is a member. And finally, to test the premium link.

This recipient is a premium member as you can see by our premium login hyperlink. Our personalization block has been successful. You should now be able to describe what dynamic content is, identify the different types of dynamic content, and compose your own personalization blocks and use them in a delivery. Thank you, and I will see you next time. -