• by Lisa Harmon , August 5, 2008

As your subscribers' inboxes bulge with more and more email, relevance becomes increasingly important. Creating emails with dynamic design and content is your ticket to targeting readers' diverse interests.

By matching message content to subscriber preferences, you can deliver emails that feel handpicked and personal in a simple and systematic way, without draining your resources. Thanks to recent technologies, the process of building an email creative framework for dynamic content is effective and efficient.

Laying the Groundwork: Building your Design and Content Libraries
By building a library of modular, flexible design elements, you'll have an exponential range of message configurations at your fingertips. Getting started is as easy as 1-2-3.

(1) Get serious. Audit all of your current and planned message types to get a sense for the kinds of content your creative framework needs to accommodate. Then consider the types of design modules that will be necessary to support them.  

(2) Get creative. Think about your color, font and graphics choices. In addition to being "on brand," dynamic designs need to be "evergreen," working with different information and configurations.

(3) Get practical. Create a content library  -- an archive of pre-built content components that you can reuse across multiple messages. You might start with your most basic messages  -- perhaps "free shipping", "become a member" or "update your email preferences." As you add to it, the content library becomes more and more valuable.

Mixing Things Up: Dynamic Email Usage Strategies
Once you've built your framework, it's time to decide how you're going to use it.  Think of the world of dynamic emails as divided into the following usage categories:

(1) Personalization. Tailored to individual recipients, personalized content reflects information gathered from preference centers and behavior history. The targeted message makes each customer feel singled-out and uniquely attended to.

(2) Segmentation. By dividing your contact lists into segments based on interests, life-phase groups and geographical location, you can send information to specific target audiences without entirely individualizing email components.

(3) Triggered messaging. Sent to specific subscribers in response to actions, triggered messages are quick responses to events, so they target subscribers who are already engaged with you and thus more likely to respond.

Now Go Forth: Put Your Own Dynamic Ideas to Work
Companies that catch on to the benefits of dynamic design and content gain an edge inside subscribers' inboxes. Don't fall behind -- give your subscribers more ways to engage by delivering relevant, dynamic content with dynamic design
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