Email Personalization

Personalized emails are emails which are to some degree tailored to the needs, interests, or behaviour of the recipient – e.g. taking into account where they live or which products they are interested in.

In Dynamicweb you can personalize emails based on smart searches – which can find users based on a wide variety of dynamic criteria, e.g. user information, user behavior, last login time, and so on.

Creating personalized content in Dynamicweb is easy:

1. First you create personalized versions of the content in the form of paragraphs
2. Then you use the Email Personalization tool to select which paragraph to show to which segment (smart search)

Read more below!

To create personalized content, simply create an email with variant city-specific information (Figure 2.1)

Figure 2.1 Personalized: City-specific paragraphs

In this case, I have three paragraphs targeting my users in three major cities – containing information on how to join the flash mob in their country – and a paragraph containing information on how to see videos of the flash mobs, targeting users who don’t have a chance to join the flash mob themselves.

Next, go to the Marketing tab (Figure 3.1) and click Email personalization.

Figure 3.1 Email personalization button

You will be presented with a view of your paragraphs, and a list of your segments (Figure 3.2)

Figure 3.2 Email personalization: content and segments

So far, there are no segments except ‘default’, which covers everyone who is not in one of the other segments.

You need to add segments matching your personalized content. To do so, click Add segment and select one of your existing smart searches (Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3 Selecting smart searches (segments)

In this scenario, you are interested in users who live in the United States, users who live in Norway, and users who live in Denmark.

Select those smart searches (or create them in the standard manner), and add them to your email personalization window (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Email personalization - with segments added

For a full list of the many cool options you have when building smart searches, check out the smart search documentation.

Now, in order to ensure that your users get the right content, it is useful to go through each segment individually.

Start by looking at the default users, i.e. those who are not covered by the other segments – in this case, it would be users in the UK and in Sweden for example.

• Should the default users receive the intro? Yes
• Should they receive the paragraphs targeting US-, Norway- or Denmark-based users? No
• Should they receive the default flash mob paragraph? Yes
• Should they receive the outro? Yes

Click the green checkmarks/red crosses to change their state, and go through the other segments in the same manner. You should end up with the following configuration (Figure 5.1)

Figure 5.1 Email personalization: Content and segments configured

With this setup:

• Users who live in the US will receive the intro, the New York flash mob, and the outro paragraphs.
• Users who live in Norway will receive the intro, the Oslo flash mob, and the outro paragraphs.
• Users who live in Denmark will receive the intro, the Copenhagen flash mob, and the outro paragraphs.
• Users who do not live in the US, Norway, or Denmark will receive the intro, the default flash mob, and the outro paragraphs

If you are a little confused, don't worry.

You can preview your email as each segment, and catch any errors early!

From the marketing tab of a page (your email), click the email preview button (Figure 6.1) to get a preview of your email.

Figure 6.1 The email preview button

You will see a preview of your page, along with a dropdown menu listing your segments (Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2 Email preview: dropdown with list of segments

You can preview the page as a user belonging to one or more of your segments.

A user cannot have both e.g. Denmark and Norway as their registered country, of course – but it’s very possible for a user to belong to more segments than one, and this lets you test these complex scenarios in an easy manner.