Many years ago while working for a growing email service provider, we utilized dynamic content regions in our customers' email campaigns. You could change content based on the data that you held for the subscriber. The difficult part was that the data had to be massaged and imported in a tedious process. Designing rules in the template wasn't easy as well. By the time you sent the email, the content was set.
We had one travel vendor that had a template that had several hundred rules in the campaign. Virtually every single subscriber had a 100% personalized email. Their open rate and conversion rates skyrocketed.
When you send an HTML email, the text is sent but the images are only requested when the subscriber opens the email. That presents a unique opportunity to tailor the content of the email based on where the subscriber is and what they're doing rather than the data associated with their record.
Kickdynamic is an email service that allows you to build dynamic, highly-personalized emails that change the content at the time the email is opened! Here are a few examples:
- Location – What if I open an email that's very close to one of many of your stores in the region? You could display an image of the store I'm closest to with hours and location.
- Device – If I'm on a mobile device, you may wish to provide a zoomed in image with more clarity, or a mobile-specific offer.
- Timing – If I have a contest with a countdown, the time left in the contest could be displayed at the time of open.
- Weather – Perhaps there's a storm rolling through and you want to promote certain products if it's raining.
- Social – Maybe I just want to share my latest social media updates!
The Kickdynamic rule builder is a powerful product that allows you to use on-open recipient context rules based on weather, device, date/time, location to adapt, optimize & update images at the time of open. You can use the rule builder to create simple rules, or use it’s advanced features for more for a fully customizable open time marketing rule engine.
One technical note on this is that once the email is opened and the image is sent… you're locked in to that image sent. Some Internet Service Providers and other Email Servers (like Exchange) cache the images local to the server. So if you decided to make an adjustment after the subscriber opened the email, they'd get the cached image.
We did some tests in those early days where we were sending out our latest blog posts (text laid out on a a background image) but since the URL to request the image didn't change from email to email, the same image kept showing up. Since you can't change the image location on the fly in the destination email HTML, you can't go back and update the image.
Still really great that Kickdynamic is specializing in these types of real-time personalized content in email. Along with testing and analytics in their platform, it looks as though they've got a very strong solution for personalized emails.
