Dynamic Content and the Power of Personalization

Transcript

Thanks so much. I’m excited to be here to walk you all through dynamic content and the benefits of using this tool that’ll save you a lot of time, hopefully. So let’s jump right into the agenda. So we’re going to start with talking about why dynamic content. What’s the benefit of using this tool? What are some best practices and some considerations? We’re then going to talk through how to segment your database using a feature called segmentations that will ultimately empower your dynamic content. And then we’ll conclude with how to report on the results of using this tool. All right, so let’s start with the why. Why dynamic content? Dynamic content is a feature within Marketo Engage that allows you to focus and sharpen the way that you interact with your database. It allows you to serve more relevant targeted content based on different characteristics of your audiences, while also eliminating the need to have to create and maintain multiple emails and landing pages, which ultimately reduces the amount of time spent having to set up a program within Marketo Engage. And it also really leads to a more clean and streamlined program design. So throughout today’s session, I’m going to be using the example of using dynamic content based on industry. Industry is a very common use case that I see a lot of my clients use. And it’s one that I hope you find easy to conceptualize. So what you see here is an example of an easy email that utilizes dynamic content based on industry. It may look like five different emails, but it actually is only one email that uses the dynamic content feature. You’ll see that the image within this email is specific to the industry. So you’ll see some books for education, a store for a rack of clothes for retail, a nurse for healthcare, cars for auto and a woodworker woodworking shop for manufacturing. So it makes it more relevant to the person receiving it. And increased relevancy really leads to more engagement. And so, you know, I mentioned that dynamic content really allows you to increase the speed in which it takes you to create your emails rather than having to create five separate emails. In this case, you’re creating one email and you’re making the piece of that email that is going to be variable dynamic. And so this is especially true when a portion of your email is going to be consistent across all different groups. And so in this example, you know, the, the body text the header text, that’s all going to be the same regardless of what industry a person is in. And so you’re only having to create those common pieces once. And that really does save a lot of time, not only upfront, but then if you, let’s say you send off your emails to your internal team that gives the green light to send out, or perhaps they have some changes. Well, let’s say they have some changes to that common area. If you weren’t using dynamic content, you’d have to make those changes five different times which, you know, takes some time. And then you hope that you don’t accidentally type it in wrong on the fourth or fifth one. And so the beauty of dynamic content is that you’re making that change once and that’s it. And so I think that’s really a huge benefit and is a time-saving capabilities around dynamic content. And that’s why I really always recommend that my customers use it when possible. So let’s talk about some considerations as it relates to dynamic content. So dynamic content is best utilized when your emails or landing pages use the same blocks of content, but that there are variations to the content within those blocks. So within a Marketo email, there’s something called modules, and those are the different blocks essentially. So your header would be a module, an image would be its own module, the body copy would be its own module, call to action button would be its own module. And so for an email that utilizes dynamic content, you’ll want to make sure that in the example of industry, that you’re using those same array of blocks. So in the same order as well. So they all start with, as an example, a header, and then a body copy, an image, a button. That would be a great use case for dynamic content because the content within each of those blocks can vary based on a person’s industry. Where dynamic content may not be a good fit is when you don’t want to include all those different blocks in that same order. So let’s say that you had a need to have a banner image for your manufacturing and auto industries, but you did not want to include that image at all for your healthcare, retail, and education industries. That would not be a good fit for a single email that would utilize dynamic content for all of those industries. And that’s because we can’t say that we want to delete the banner image from some groups, but not for all. So your options would be the first old fashioned route that we just talked about creating five different emails, or you could get kind of creative. You could say, I want to have two emails, one that’s going to fit my manufacturing and auto needs that has the banner image, and one that would have no banner image that would fit the healthcare, retail, education needs. And so you could still make those dynamic, but you have two different emails instead of five. So again, you’re saving some time there. If you go a more creative approach like that, you’ll just want to be extra careful that in the campaigns that you’re setting up to send out those emails, that you are specifying who should receive which email. That way, no one receives both emails, which would not be the intention. Another consideration is each element, which are those blocks that we talked about, can only be dynamic based on one grouping or one segmentation. And so within a single email or landing page, you can have multiple groups or segmentations used, but for each individual block, it can only be a dynamic based on one. So you’ll see in this screenshot that I have two different groups, two different segmentations. I have my industry segmentation, and I have my language segmentation. And so I’m using both in my single email here. And what I can do is say, I would like my image to be dynamic based on a person’s industry. And I want all of the text to be dynamic based on language. Well, as long as those are separate elements within your email, that is a perfect use case that can be accomplished very straightforward. What we can’t do, however, is say, I want the header text to be dynamic based on both the person’s industry and a person’s language. So just keep that in mind as you’re designing your emails. So as with everything in Marketo Engage, it is really important that you always test thoroughly before you launch a program. And so one of the first steps when launching a new email is previewing that email to make sure that it displays all of the content that you intended. And so when you hit preview on an email, there is an option to view by segmentation. So if your email’s only using one segmentation or group, in our first example of industry, you can say I want to view by segmentation, select industry as that segmentation. And then you can click on each of the different values, which are all the different industry values that we’ve set up to make sure that the content aligns with each of those groups. Now, if your email is using more than one segmentation, so in our second example, using both industry and language, a better approach to previewing rather than just preview by segmentation, because you can only preview by one segmentation at a time. So if you want to see the whole combination of both, the approach that I recommend is to create either a test lead, or perhaps find in your database, people that have the various combinations of values that you’re looking for. So as an example, let’s say that you’re looking for people who have an industry of retail, and a language of German, as well as a, other people that have industry of manufacturing and a language of French and all those various combinations that you’ve set up. And so you can view, you can preview by person, and then you’d actually input that person’s email address, as you can see in the screenshot. And that way you can see what the full combination of content looks like based on those different values. So after you’ve previewed, the next step is to send samples. And so that will help give you an accurate depiction of what the email looks like in the inbox. And so you can verify that all of the links work, that all the images are rendering correctly, that all the text is displayed correctly. And so you’ll want to send samples of these emails. Similarly to my recommendation with previewing, if your email is only using one segmentation, you can send a sample based on segment. So as you see here, I’m sending a sample based on healthcare, for example. So you want to send yourself a sample for each and every of those industry segments. If your email is using more than one segmentation, so again, our example of industry and language, you’ll want to take those tests or real records that you have and send samples based on person, which is the second screenshot here. So it’s going to look as if the email is being sent to that person, but in actuality, it’s going to be sent to you in your inbox. And so that will show you what the combination of content looks like based on those different variables. Okay. So now we’ve talked about dynamic content. Let’s move on to segmentations. So segmentations are another feature within Marketo Engage that allow you to group or categorize your records, your leads and contacts into different groups or categories. And the primary purpose of segmentations is to power your dynamic content. You’ll hear this throughout the session, but you cannot have dynamic content without segmentation. And so in our example of industry, industry would be the segmentation. Within a segmentation, we have segments. So again, industry would be the segmentation. Our segments would be manufacturing, auto, retail, et cetera. And those are the different values within that larger group. In the example of language, language would be our segmentation and French, German, English, Spanish, et cetera, would be our various segments. And so these segmentations live within the database of Marketo Engage. And the way they’re set up, it’s very similar to a smart list. You’re essentially using a series of filters. So in the case of industry, you might just be using a field called industry. So industry equals auto, for example, or automotive. Whereas with language, you might use a different field. So perhaps preferred language equals English. And so you set them up very similarly to smart lists. The biggest difference is that segmentations, again, power dynamic content. And another big difference is that a person can only reside in one segment within a segmentation. So the order in which you set up your segments is going to be very important because a person will enter into the first segment that they qualify for. So you’ll see this screenshot right here is what it looks like when you set up a new segmentation. And you’ll see that the different segments are listed in an order. And now what this says is auto is the first order, the first priority. And so if a person happened to fall into more than one industry, so let’s say they had both automotive and retail, they would receive content based. They would receive the version of the auto content. If you were to send out an email based on dynamic content on industry, because auto is listed as the priority. If you wanted to change the order of priority, it’s very simple. You can just simply drag and drop each of those different values and rearrange the order in which you see those segments. You’ll see that there is number six is called default. So with every segmentation, Marketo engage creates a additional segment called the default segment. And that’s where people go that don’t meet any of the other criteria in the segments that you’ve defined. So for example, if a person fell into an industry that wasn’t one of these five categories here, or perhaps they didn’t have any industry stored in your database, they would fall into that default segment. And so when you’re creating your dynamic content, you’ll want to make sure that you also create a version for that default bucket. That way that people that fall into default will receive an email that is relevant and up to date. All right, so some considerations around segmentations. As I mentioned, and I’ll say it again, dynamic content is reliant on segmentations. So the first step to use dynamic content is to first go into your database and create that segmentation and approve it. A segmentation has to be approved before it can be used with dynamic content. Speaking of approved segmentations, there is a limit to the number of approved segmentations that you can have in your Marketo engage instance. And that limit is 20. Within those 20 segmentations, you can have up to 100 segments. So again, industry being the segmentation, manufacturing, auto healthcare, etc, being the segments, so you could have up to 100 of those industries. Because there is that limit, we typically recommend making sure that your segmentation is broad enough that it kind of covers all your various use cases. For you know, multiple programs within your Marketo engage instance, we typically don’t recommend creating a segmentation specific and only applicable to one program. However, we understand that there is sometimes a need to high priority program. So if you do need to create a segmentation specific to one program, I recommend that after the program has run its course that you unapproved that segmentation, it’ll still be there in your database, it just won’t be approved. And that way it frees up space for other future segmentations. Another consideration is that performance of your Marketo engage instance can be impacted. If your segmentations use fields that change very frequently. So we only typically recommend using fields that are fairly static, meaning they don’t change too often. So that’s why industry is a really great example. A company’s industry typically isn’t going to change on an hourly or daily basis. It might change down the road, but not super frequent. And so just something to keep in mind there. And then also segmentations are only reevaluated, which means a person only fits into a new segment if there is a change in that person’s field value. So if my industry changed from auto to retail, then Marketo would run in the background and put me now into that retail segment. So it only puts people into new segments when there is a change in a person’s field value. Alrighty, so we’ve talked about dynamic content, we’ve talked about segmentations. Let’s talk about how to report on your dynamic content. So within your, any email performance report, within the setup tab of that report, there is an option to segment your results by segmentations. And so you’ll see here that I’m on the setup tab of my report, under the settings, there is an option to drag in group by segmentations. And I’ve selected industry here because that is the example we’ve been given throughout this presentation. And so I’m going to group my results by industry. And this is what it would look like. It would show all of those typical email performance metrics that you might expect to see, such as how many were sent, how many emails were delivered, how many bounced both hard and soft bounce, how many were opened, the percent opened, how many were clicked, the percent clicked, clicked open, right and unsubscribe. And it’s going to group those results by segment. And so you can use the results that you see to help guide future decisions as it relates to your programs. So if you see here, retail performed great, 100% delivery, 100% open rate. And so if I wasn’t already spending some time marketing to my retail industry, you might want to change gear slightly because this is a really engaged audience. And so you can use these types of reports to really help guide program design and focus moving forward. And so the reports are really meant to show you aggregate numbers. If you want to dive into who specifically opened my email, who specifically clicked or who unsubscribed by segment, you can easily do that by creating a smart list. And so in your smart lists, you’ll see here’s three examples. The first one being opened, you can pull in your opened email activity filter. And then every time you create a segmentation, within the database of your Marketo engage instance, a new filter will also be automatically created. And so you’ll see here, we have an industry segment filter. I also have a language segment filter. And so what you can do is use those filters in any of your smart lists. And so if I wanted to see how many people with or not even how many, but who specifically, who of my education segment opened my email, I can create a smart list that’ll give me who those specific people are. Likewise, if I wanted to create a smart list of who specifically clicked my email, that’s in the education segment, I can create that as you can see the filters here in the screenshot, same thing with unsubscribed, same thing with any of the activity filters that you have available within your Marketo engage instance, you can simply use those new segment filters to see of your various segments, who’s taking what actions. All right, so we’ve covered reporting. Let’s talk about the key takeaways that I want you to leave this session with. The first being dynamic content is a feature within Marketo engage that allows you to send more targeted relevant content to your audiences. I mentioned relevancy really drives engagement. Number two, segmentations power dynamic content. You can’t have dynamic content without a segmentation. So make sure the first step in the process is creating and approving those segmentations. And number three, you’re able to easily report on the results of your dynamic content using email performance reports and segmenting by segmentation. And that’ll help drive future decisions and future recommendations in terms of your program build. Well, those are some great insights into making effective programs and utilizing segmentation in Marketo. Thanks so much, Molly, and welcome. Thanks, Stephanie. Really looking forward to diving into everyone’s questions. Well, we have some great ones from the chat. So let’s get started. Our first question is what are some common segmentation use cases you see? Sure, that’s a great question. So there’s a couple segmentations that I see very frequently with my clients. The first is language. So this is especially true for clients that market globally. It’s a great way to be able to send out content based on a person’s preferred language that also goes hand in hand with a country segmentation. So perhaps in addition to the actual language itself, you want to send them relevant information based on the country in which they reside. That’s a perfect use case for a segmentation. Another segmentation that I see pretty frequently is persona based segmentations. So that could be a combination of perhaps a job function in addition to a job level. And let’s see, another common use case would be around perhaps a person type. So some common segments would be prospect versus customer. If you want to change the content slightly depending on whether a person’s already a customer or perhaps still a prospect. So those are just a few that I see in addition to, of course, that industry segmentation that I use throughout the session. Great. Thanks for those extra use cases. So Jen’s wondering, with smart lists to find out who can I use that to create a task in Salesforce.com for the sales rep to follow up? So, yes. So in your smart list, I’m understanding the question correctly. You can have any number of filters that you would like. So it could be a filter that’s from your actual segmentation, or it could be any sort of activity or inactivity filters or any sort of fields that you want to filter on. That would be in the smart list of your smart campaign. And then in the flow of the smart campaign, you would use a task, a create task flow step, and that would create a task in Salesforce. Perfect. So, okay, hopefully this one’s easy. How do you send a segmented email? How do you send a segmented email? So I think you’re asking how do you enable your email for dynamic content? So the first step with that is actually creating your segmentation and then approving that segmentation. That is the key. Segmentation has to be approved before you can use it with dynamic content. And then once that segmentation is approved, you would go into your email, edit the email, and then each of the elements that you would like to be dynamic, you would click this little gear icon at the top right of that element. You would click on that gear icon and say, make dynamic. Once you select that, there’ll be a dropdown. So you can select which segmentation you would actually like to use to power that particular element. And then you’d select your segmentation that you would like to use. And then along the right-hand side of the email editor, you’ll have all of the various segments within that segmentation. And you would click into each of the different elements along that right-hand side and start entering in your dynamic content. Okay. So can you use dynamic content in templates and global assets? So the dynamic content is done at the individual email level. So those can be within a Marketo program in marketing activities, but they can also be in your actual assets within Design Studio as well. So I’d like to think of any emails that live within Design Studio as global assets. And so you can use dynamic content with those emails as well, but not templates. They’re really meant for individual email assets. Perfect. Thanks for that. So is the 20 limit specific to segmentations or segments? Great question. So the 20 limit is around the actual segmentations. So think of the industry, language, those are your segmentations. The 100 limit is for your segments. So all of the values within that segmentation. Okay. Thank you. So Trevor is asking if we segment users based on product usage and analytics, like something like Pendo or Amplitude, can we mirror that as a segmentation in Marketo? So as long as that data is coming into Marketo, you could in theory segment on that data. So when you’re building out your segmentations, the segments within those segmentations are very similar to smart lists. So as long as the data that’s coming from those different partners are stored in fields within Marketo, you could in theory use those within your segmentation. Okay. And Trevor, you are a treasure. All right, Jackie is wondering, when you go to sending your campaign, what do you need to pull up in order to send it to the right segmentation? Great question. And this can definitely be something that’s a bit confusing to new users. So you would define your audience in your smart campaign like you normally would. In the backend, Marketo is then telling of the people in your smart campaign, where do those people fit into your segmentation? Which segment do they belong to within that segmentation? And so Marketo is actually determining which version of that email that person should receive. Okay, thank you. And Angelica is wondering, can you create a report on multiple segments at once? For example, a record engaged with multiple products within one instance. So your segmentation filters within a report, with an email performance report, you can select more than one segmentation. If you’re using the segmentation filter in a smart list, for example, you also could select pull in different segment filters within that smart list. And the smart list then can be used in other reports as well. Okay, so can I make my entire email dynamic? So in theory, as long as every element within your email is editable, you can make each of those elements dynamic. And that actually includes the from name, the from address, the reply to, and the subject line. All right, what about snippets? Can those become dynamic? Yes, that’s another great question. So snippets operate slightly differently than your typical emails, they’re blocks of content that live within the design studio that can be used and reused across emails. And so they are when you’re making it dynamic, it’s when you’re creating that snippet. And you set it up very similarly to how you’d make other elements of your email dynamic, you pick the segmentation in which you would like to power that snippet. And you would approve that snippet there. And so when you’re adding a snippet to your email, you don’t have to tell Marketo, how you want to make that snippet dynamic in the email itself, that’s already going to be established in the design studio within the snippet itself. Gotcha. So I can make my whole email dynamic, I can make my snippets. But is there a limit to the number of emails that use dynamic content? No, there is no limit. I’ve never seen a client use dynamic content in every email in their instance. But that’s not to say it couldn’t be done. There is no product limitation to the number of emails that can have dynamic content enabled. Okay. And so Josh is wondering, can I use a segmentation before it’s approved? So Josh, unfortunately, no, the first step, as I mentioned, is first creating that segmentation, and then approving that segmentation before it can be used with dynamic content. So you’ll see that as your segmentation is approving, it’ll show the status of that segmentation, it’ll say if it’s in draft, if it’s approved, or if it’s approving, until it’s actually approved. When you go to make an element dynamic, and you have to pick the segmentation in which you would like that dynamic content powered, you will not see that segmentation as an available option to select until it’s fully approved. Okay. And can these segmented emails be used for current customers or just prospects? It can be used for your entire database, so customers or prospects. And if you’d like to create a segmentation for person type, like Guy alluded to earlier, you could use a single email and have that content vary depending on whether or not a person is a prospect or a customer. Okay. And then the segmentations, can they get used in smart lists? Yes. So segmentations, so every time you create a new segmentation and approve it, Mercado will automatically create a segment filter for you to use. And so in my case of, my example of industry, when I created my industry segmentation and approved it, Mercado automatically created a filter called industry segment. So that segment can then be used in standalone smart lists. It can be used in smart campaigns, so you could use it in the smart list of your smart campaign to use that to filter your audience. It can be used in the flow of your smart campaign. So when you have a flow step, such as changing a data value, so changing a field value, you could add choices to that flow step and use that segment in your choices. And then it can also be used for reporting purposes as well. Okay. And Martin wants to know, can we use segmentation in subject lines? Yes. You can use dynamic content in subject lines. And so next to the subject line, when you’re in that email editor, there are two icons. The first to the right is for tokens. And then the one next to that is there’s two squares. That is how you make your subject line dynamic. So you select the little square icon, a little box will pop up and you can say make dynamic and you’d pick that segmentation that you would like to use for that subject line. Excellent. So Wendy has a team that has multiple segments. So how can she use different segments to display dynamic content in an email? So I think the question is referring to, can you use multiple segmentations in a single email? And the answer is yes. However, for each element within that email, it can only be dynamic based on one segmentation. So in my example, I gave in the session, my presentation, rather, I could have my image, my hero image be dynamic based on industry, for example. And then I could have the body copy of my email dynamic based on my language segmentation. What I can’t do is say, I want my image to be dynamic based on both a combination of industry and language. So each element can only be dynamic based on one segmentation, but throughout your entire email, you could have multiple segmentations in play. Okay. So what about retiring a segmentation? Will that still show up in reporting or are we going to need to reinstate it? So then it might show up in a report of a past email. Great question. So once a segmentation is unapproved, it can no longer be in use. If you needed to use that segmentation in the future, it’s very easy. You can simply just re-approve that segmentation and it’ll be there for you to use throughout Marketo. But keep in mind that you do have that limit of 20 approved segmentations. So if you’re at your limit and you want to bring back an old segmentation, you will have to unapprove an existing segmentation to be able to do so. Thanks for that, gotcha. You know, so I’ve been wondering, because we heard from Hillary, we got, you know, about tokens and we heard from you more about dynamic chat. When should I use a token versus, I mean, dynamic chat, excuse me, dynamic content? When should I use a token versus dynamic content? Sure. So the data that’s powering tokens and dynamic content come from two different spots. The data that powers dynamic content are your segmentations. So think of those as groups of people. So if you’re sharing common attributes, whereas the tokens are pulling from data within the database. So individual data points, some common examples would be first name, company name, things like that. And so you can actually use both dynamic content and tokens in a single email. So you could say, I want my image to be dynamic based on industry. I want the content of my email to be dynamic based on language, but I want to be able to personalize that content with the person’s first name. So you could use dynamic content, but also use a token in there to pull in that personalized information. Okay. So we know that there are hundreds of industries. So is there a way that customers can get around the hundred segment limit? So the hundred segment limit is a hard and vast limit. However, what I would do is think about what are those industries that I actually market to, and really build my segments around those that I’m actually targeting. And then perhaps for the others, group those into less commonly used industries. And so what Marketo does is after you have your defined segments, it creates a default segment. So anyone that doesn’t fit the criteria of those segments that you define will go into that default segment. And so again, I would pick me perhaps the top hundred segments that you do business in, and then have everyone else fall into that default segment. Okay. And this is going to be our last question. So how long will it take my segment, my segmentation to approve? So there is no hard number to that. It’s actually really going to be variable depending on the database and the complexity of the rules within your segment. So the larger the database, the longer it will take to approve. And so I’ve seen clients that have a very small database, and it could be approved within five, 10 minutes, and I’ve seen it take much longer as well. So my recommendation is make sure you build enough time when you’re going to execute an email dynamic content to allow that segmentation time to approve. What I don’t recommend doing is if you have an email that needs to go out in 15 minutes and you have no segmentation built, that would not probably work very well. So I recommend giving yourself enough time to build that segmentation, approve it, and then go to build your email with dynamic content. Well, thanks for those tips, Molly. I know with those, our attendees are going to hit the bull’s eye when targeting their audiences with feature programs. Great. Thank you so much. And I look forward to speaking with you guys shortly.