Configuring dynamic content

Welcome to Adobe Campaign Classic. In this module we will be looking at how to configure dynamic content. By 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 personalisation 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 are 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 customise 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 personalised, resulting in the recipient not feeling 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 personalised 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 menswear or womenswear. If you want to take it a step further and apply large scale personalisation with easy reusability you should opt for personalisation blocks. These are effectively templates that are dynamic, personalised 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 personalisation field except you use the add symbol instead of an equals. To import these in personalisation blocks within your delivery you use the JavaScript construct similar to the personalisation field except you use the add symbol instead of an equals. Adobe Campaign comes with some out of the box personalisation blocks such as greetings, a mirror page and subscription links. With these in place it significantly helps reduce the marketer’s time by only focusing on the content and let certain personalisation blocks handle the reusable content. Now follow along as we are able to create our own personalisation block and use it in a delivery. To create a personalisation block navigate to the explorer. Go to resources, campaign management and personalisation blocks. Here are all the out of the box personalisation 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 log in 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 dropdown again. Go to recipient 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 a recipient are expressed as numbers in the database. And the value 0 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 0 single quote. Now we will enter our content 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 target to open in a new window. Press add to complete. You can now see that 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 the membership level is not 0, meaning they are a member, then render this portion of the content instead. Like before we will go to this dropdown, conditional content and select else. Like before we will enter our content. We will say login. Highlight the text, do hyperlink, I will 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 will place this condition. We will go to this dropdown, conditional content, the else if. We now need to insert the member select field again. So we will go to this dropdown and recipient. Membership level is here and it is at the top level because it is our most recently used attribute. And the value we need to change. In this case we will be looking for the value 4, which is the number used to represent premium members. Now we need to change the content. We will 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, member block. 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 our register link showing that this recipient is not a member. We go to a different recipient. We’ll 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 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.