Configure dynamic content

In this module, we will be looking at how to configure dynamic content. By the end of the module, you will know what dynamic content is, how to identify the different types of dynamic content, and how to compose dynamic content. In today’s climate, you won’t find much luck marketing to someone who has no interest in what you’re offering. As marketers, we want to be playing our customers’ interests and make our content effective and manageable. The more information we gather about our recipients, the better we will be at targeting relevant content for them. Given the variety of recipients we are likely to encounter, we will have to create multiple pieces of marketing content, potentially hundreds, to appeal to a variety of people which is wasteful and time-consuming. This is where dynamic content comes into play. Using dynamic content in Adobe Campaign, we can leverage tools within our content delivery creator and customize it to change based on the attributes of our recipient. Dynamic content is more relevant, meaning we aren’t marketing unwanted or unneeded products or services. It is more appealing and makes it so our content will actually be read and more personalized. This results in the recipient feeling like they are receiving content from a person instead of a machine. To make use of dynamic content within the HTML of our email delivery, we 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. The construct is similar to the first example, except it doesn’t have the equal sign in the directive. For example, we can use these to check a recipient’s gender and then, based on the results, only show content that is relevant to these recipients, such as a link to menswear or womenswear. If we want to take this a step further, we can apply large-scale personalization with easy reusability using personalization blocks. These are templates that are dynamically personalized and contain rendering code that can be added to all deliveries. We can use them to add headers, images, basic copyright content, and much more. To import these personalization blocks into our delivery, we use the JavaScript construct similar to the personalization field, except that we 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 to reduce a marketer’s time spent creating reusable, personalized content. This is done by focusing on the content and lets certain personalization blocks handle the reusable content. Now that we understand how personalization blocks work, let’s create our own personalization block and use it for a delivery. To create a personalization block, navigate to the Explorer. Then, open the Resources dropdown, followed by Campaign Management, and select Personalization Blocks. We are able to see all the out-of-the-box personalization blocks and the option to create our own. Select the New icon in the top right to open a window where we 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 a recipient is a member or not. Let’s start by moving the window higher up so we can see it better. First, let’s change the label to Member Block and change the internal name to Member Block 1. Make sure to check the content of the personalization block depends upon the Format box. This box enables rendering in either HTML or text, depending on the recipient’s mailbox headings. It’s best practice to enter our HTML using the Source tab at the bottom. You can switch to the HTML tab for a better view of the layout, toggling between both views. Next, let’s insert a conditional statement from the dropdown located in the top right of the HTML content window. Hover over Conditional Content and select If. Campaign will generate an If statement with placeholders that we need to update. Select the menu dropdown again, hover over Recipients, and we’re able to view some of the more common attributes. To see all of them, select Other and the filed selection popover appears. Within this window, we can search for the attribute or navigate to find the attribute we want. For this example, we want membership level. Double-clicking the attribute will insert it into the text editor for us. Now, a lot of these attributes on the recipients are expressed as numbers in the database, and the value of 0 is used to represent a recipient who is not a member. If the recipient is not a member, it will render the content with this conditional block. So let’s enter single quote 0 single quote. Once we’ve entered our value, we’re ready to enter our content. Let’s replace the placeholder text with the word register. Next, highlight the word and select the Insert Hyperlink button. We can now enter our registration URL in this text field. Enter the URL you wish to use and select a target from the dropdown, then select Add. The basic HTML will automatically be added to our source code. We can go to the HTML view to get a rendered view of our 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. This means if their membership level is not 0, or in other words they are a member, then render this portion of the content instead. Like before, let’s navigate to the dropdown located in the top right of the HTML content window. Hover over Conditional Content and select Else. Similar to what we just did with register, let’s replace the placeholder text with Login, highlight the text, select the Insert Hypertext Link button, and enter a URL with the target being a new window. Press Add to finish. We now have two conditions. One checking if the recipient is not a member and therefore rendering a hyperlink to register, and the second condition targets all other members regardless of their level and provides 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. Because this is an Else If statement, it will need to be put in between the two conditions we already created. After creating space between our conditions, use the dropdown menu we’re familiar with and hover over Conditional Content followed by selecting Else If. We will need to replace the placeholders again. Let’s start by replacing the field placeholder by highlighting it, selecting the dropdown menu, hovering over recipient, and selecting membership level. It will be at the top because it’s our most recently used attribute. Next, we need to assign a value. In this case, we will assign a value of 4 which is the number used to represent premium members. Remember to add the single quotes. We now need to change the content. Similar to the previous login link we provided, let’s create a premium login. Highlight the text and use the hyperlink button followed by providing a URL, a target, and select Add. We can now render a special login for our premium members. Because this is HTML, we will need to clean up the constructs in order for them to work. Delete all the derivatives between the first and last derivative. We have now created our first personalization block using conditional statements. Now, let’s apply it to an email delivery to see it in action. Navigate to Deliveries and select Create to open the delivery popover. In our HTML content, we will add an out of the box greeting personalization block followed by our custom personalization block. Start by selecting our familiar dropdown, hover over include, then select Other. This opens a window that has all the personalization blocks. Let’s select Greetings and do the same again for our custom personalization block. We now have two blocks included in our HTML content. Next, we want to make sure everything is working as expected. To do this, we can select Preview. Next, in the Test Personalization dropdown, we can select Recipients and see how the content is rendered based on the different recipients. The first recipient has a registered link showing that the recipient is not a member. Looking at a different recipient, we see that we are greeted with a login hyperlink meaning this recipient is a member. And finally, to test the Premium link, we need to add a member we know should be Premium. Once selected, we can see our Premium login hyperlink. 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. Thanks for watching!