Have you noticed how nowadays when you visit sites like Amazon, you get offers and adverts on products and other items that are most likely to be of interest to you, and you’ve contemplated purchasing them, at some point in the past?
You must have also observed the occasional pop ups reminding you of the discount you’ll be missing, if you don’t purchase the items you’re about to abandon in your shopping cart.
Well, these are clearly some of the ways how ‘dynamic content’ is being used to enhance and tailor your online buying experience, to fit your needs and personal preferences. And that’s the reason why my wife gets promos of blenders and juicers, whereas I get bombarded with car parts and accessories, even though we log into the same website through our individual accounts.
As per HubSpot, dynamic content, which is also referred to as ‘adaptive’ or ‘smart’ content, is a term for the aspects of a website, ad, or email body that change based on the interests or past behaviour of the viewer. It creates an experience that's customised specifically for the visitor or reader at that moment.
That’s how sites like Amazon factors in your recent searches and purchases to display those products it decides as being more relevant to you, and therefore increases the probability of purchase or conversion. No wonder 35% of Amazon’s revenue is generated by its recommendation engine.
How else can dynamic content be leveraged to boost engagement and conversion rates? Let’s explore 5 powerful ways to do just that:
1. Email ‘precision’ Targeting
Dynamic Content can be equally effective with email marketing, as it is with online browsing. You can use dynamic content in newsletters, email product campaigns or even with ‘shopping cart abandonment’ emails.
Cart abandonment emails are estimated to achieve a 29% success rate in recovering lost conversions. You can begin with personalising subject line or pre-header text with user’s name, but the trick is to use dynamic content within the email itself to remind them of the product they’ve just left behind in the cart.
The consumer can be then alerted by saying the stock is limited, or create a sense of urgency or incentivise by stating that the discount offer will expire within a few days.
The example above is of a dynamic CTA (Call To Action), sent within a cart abandonment email by online retailer Fab.com. The CTA is precisely targeted to incentivise and nudge the recipient to click on the link that leads directly to the purchase page.
2. Dynamic Transactional Emails
The other clever use of dynamic content can be seen in transactional emails like the e-receipts. These are a boon for marketers, as they are the only emails that your subscribers specifically ask to receive, thus automatically generating higher open rates.
Here’s an example of how dynamic content blocks can be used in your e-receipts to create highly targeted bounce-back offers, based on your customers’ past purchase history and profile:
The receipt here is cleverly crafted to include highly-personalised promotional offers for the customer, who will immediately get the sense that you understand who they are. And to top it up, the email also contains a ‘social proof’ – “people who bought what you did also bought…” – which acts as a huge trigger for the recipients to shop for more.
3. Personalised Product Recommendations
This is one lucrative trick which the giants like Amazon and Netflix have capitalised the most. In fact, Bigcommerce claims that you can increase your store revenue by 300% and conversions by 150% by focusing on enhancing the experience of customers that have already interacted with your brand, rather than chasing potential new ones.
Brands like Amazon use ‘recommendation engines’ or ‘recommender systems’ to deliver dynamic content to not only recommend, but they’re also highly adept at guiding consumers through their buyer’s journeys from product discovery to checkout, by displaying relevant content at every stage along the way.
The engines’ algorithms capture, collect and analyze customer data and behaviour to come up with the most relevant product recommendations for each individual. A process termed as “collaborative filtering”. Amazon was the first to implement this process at scale in eCommerce.
In the above example, recommendations are made as per the user’s shopping trends and also by displaying the choices of items of other people, who were interested in the same books as the user – i.e. ‘collaborative filtering’ at work.
This is also quite common with Netflix where the users receive recommendations on TV shows and movies based on their streaming history and the ratings they’ve made on the site. In fact, the method has helped Netflix to massively increase its revenue – Their estimates for the recommender system were worth $1 billion per year, in 2016!
4. Dynamic ‘Search’ Content
There was a time (not so long ago) when the ‘search’ function was simply about finding if the internet carried any data in relevance to the exact words we typed on the search box. Today, innovations in ‘search technologies’ have not only taken us past those humble days, but have drastically changed the way we interact and behave with our digital interfaces.
With Dynamic ‘content’, search function is increasingly becoming a ‘navigational’ and ‘conversion’ tool, that can assist us in distilling our queries or smoothly leading us to the final stages of the ‘buyer’s journey.’
If you’re running an ecommerce site, the potential to ‘conversion-optimize’ the queries is much higher with autocomplete and autocorrect features. For instance, if you have a limited inventory of products, it is possible to recommend products or categories, directly to the search terms. This will expedite the process of discovery for your users and they can jump onto the preferred option, right from the search bar, without having to waste time browsing several sites.
Even for big sites like Alibaba, where the product listings are massive, dynamic search content helps the users to complete and narrow down their searches, leading them to the products directly.
In the example above, the users cannot only find relevant and popular searches for their product queries, but they can also hover over any of these ‘suggested phrases’ and find the most often used and further filtered key words for the phrases itself.
5. Dynamic Banners and Videos
Dynamic banner ads are unique in the sense they can preserve the consistency of users’ experience and preference, even when the users leave your site. These banners and videos come as a ‘retargeting tool’ for marketers, as they are displayed on offsite channels, rather than the product’s original website.
The example above is that of a Dynamic Facebook Retargeting Banner, where is displaying (suggesting) items considered relevant to the user; as gathered from the browsing pattern, purchase history and past interaction of the user with the main website.
The dynamic banner functionality is provided by major networks (here Facebook), and to create one you need to follow detailed instructions on how to set up content feed that works with their service. To display your ads on Facebook, you can explore the instructions here: (Requirements of the Facebook Dynamic Ads feed).
Over To You…
Studies from Gartner indicates that by 2020, smart personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 15%. And as we’re already witnessing, digital consumers are increasingly tilting towards receiving a more personalised, swift and fulfilling buying experience. It’s clear that marketers looking to maximise their conversion rates should start considering investing in dynamic content technologies across all marketing channels.
Call Andy Fox (me) on (03) 5249 5570 or email andy@element7digital.com.au
Our Website is element7digital.com.au
