5 Smart Ways to Send Better Messages With Dynamic Content

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It’s a fact of life these days: if you have a smartphone, odds are that you’re getting a lot of messages from brands. Push notifications. Emails. Even SMS. That means your customers aren’t just getting your messages—they’re hearing from a lot of other brands, too, possibly including your competitors.

And if the messages you’re sending don’t speak to them as individuals, not only are you not doing everything you can to drive purchases and other conversions, you’re running the risk that they’ll tune you out. After all, 78% of users will opt out of push notifications or even uninstall an app if they get push they’re unhappy with.

There’s no one thing that marketers can do to make their messaging engaging and relevant to the people receiving it—there are a lot of things! But if you’re looking for a way to stand out from the crowd and make your outreach more timely and compelling, consider using dynamic content to personalize the messages you send. This powerful tool boosts conversions by 27% and allows you to send of-the-moment messages that provide a more relevant, more engaging experience for recipients.

To help you get started, we’ve highlighted five smart ways that marketers in fields as diverse as retail, finance, media, and travel can use dynamic content to support better customer messaging. Take a look!

1. Insert product suggestions from an in-house recommendation engine into outreach

While they’re strongly associated with ecommerce, recommendation engines are an important part of the marketing strategy for a wide variety of brands in the retail, media, food delivery, and dating verticals, among others. These engines, which use demographic data and customer behavioral information from a variety of sources, are commonly used within the web or app experience to nudge customers to make a selection or purchase by serving up options that are particularly likely to interest them.

Promotional email using dynamic content to include specific brand logos

With dynamic content, marketers can take these personalized recommendations and automatically include them in the body of the push notifications and emails they send, ensuring that those messages contain the most current, relevant recommendations. You can also take advantage of publicly available APIs to pull relevant brand logos into messages, making them more clear and visually compelling.

2. Adjust messages based on each recipient’s local weather

For many brands, one key element of their mobile marketing strategy is using messaging to drive increased purchases. One smart, responsive way to do that is by using dynamic content to adjust what messages users receive based on the weather at their location at the time the outreach is delivered.

Promotional emails using dynamic content to adjust content based on recipient’s local weather

That makes it possible to send a single campaign that delivers one push notification to users in areas where the weather is nice that encourages them to stop by your brand’s closest location, and another push notification to users in areas with bad weather that suggests placing orders using your app. By personalizing the promotion based on local weather conditions, you can avoid urging customers to go out shopping during a blizzard while still driving higher in-store purchases for people in regions unaffected by the storm. That’s powerful.

3. Trigger customized messages based on swings in the stock market

For finance or news brands, dynamic content can be a powerful way to re-engage users and encourage them to return to the app. Marketers can use this tool to include stock and commodity listings in their messages, and to trigger different messages based on the rise or fall of indexes or individual listings, making it possible to grab users’ attention with up-to-the-minute messaging based on real-time shifts in financial markets.

Push notifications using dynamic content to include stock price and market information

However, if you are going to use dynamic content to drive this kind of messaging, be thoughtful about what event you use to trigger your outreach: while receiving a push about a major market swing may drive a disengaged customer to your app, sending one every time the Dow Jones rises or falls may well drive them to opt out of push or uninstall your app.

4. Add relevant movie showtimes, concert, and event listings to outreach

For media brands, dynamic content makes it possible to add a whole new layer of personalization to messages based on the location of each recipient. Marketers can leverage public APIs to add local movie showtimes and up-to-the-minute event information to their messages, ensuring relevancy.

Push notifications using dynamic content to include movie showtime data

For instance, if a user frequently views content on a particular actor, or indicates interest in movies in a particular genre, you could use dynamic content to send them a push notification that automatically pulls in film showtimes to relevant movies in their area. The same is possible when it comes to nearby concerts, literary readings, and other cultural events. By taking advantage of dynamic content, marketers can demonstrate their app’s value and provide users with useful information.

5. Add news headlines and other location-specific data to messages for users who booked travel

For travel and hospitality brands, the time between when a user books a flight or hotel room and when that booking rolls around is a major opportunity to build brand loyalty. By using dynamic content, it’s possible to send customers helpful outreach that will improve their travel experience and support a stronger customer/brand relationships over the long-term.

Imagine that one of your users booked a flight to Madrid. In addition to sending them simple, transactional push notifications or emails reminding them about their flight, or letting them know about gate changes, you could send them an email that uses dynamic content to include news headlines from the neighborhood they’ll be staying in, local weather conditions, and other information that will help them plan for their trip. You’ll be supporting a better user experience and strengthening their bond with your brand, all with a single message.