Dynamic Content: An Overview, Examples, and Best Practices

To make any marketing campaign successful, one of the biggest things that you need to do is to find ways to boost customer engagement. And boosting engagement isn’t necessarily all about keeping eyes on your webpages for longer spans of time or keeping customers interested and entertained.

Instead, it’s all about delivering the content and information that customers want — where and when they want it.

Those happen to be the biggest benefits to dynamic content. With this type of content, you can create experiences that change as customers interact with your brand.

Ready to learn how it works? Read below to learn all about dynamic content, see some examples, and discover a few best practices to get you started.

What Is Dynamic Content?

The basic definition of dynamic content is simple: It’s content that changes. The idea behind dynamic content is to provide a personalized experience for a specific viewer in the moment that they’re viewing the content. 

So whenever you visit an ecommerce site and recommendations pop up, pay attention to those. Often, they’re based on your history of interactions with that site. These dynamic content blocks are tailored to what the site thinks you want to see — and that’s an example of dynamic content. 

That’s just one example — and there are many more. Any type of data-driven content that changes based on data collected from a user’s interactions with a website is a type of dynamic content. 

What Is the Difference Between Dynamic Content and Static Content?

If dynamic content is content that changes to suit user preferences, static content is the opposite. It stays the same from one viewer to the next. Blog posts, YouTube videos, social posts — these are all examples of static content that doesn’t change, even if elements elsewhere on the page change to reflect different sets of user data.

Not that static content is a bad thing! There will always be a demand for this type of content. However, in certain use cases, like email marketing, paid ads, or product recommendations, dynamic content works better because it delivers content aligned with individual tastes rather than casting a broader, more generalized net.

What Is an Example of Dynamic Content?

We showed you above how personalized shopping and product recommendations are one type of dynamic content, but there are others. We’ll outline a few more examples below.

Location-Based Content

Ever noticed how some websites know your location or even the device or browser that you’re using? Sometimes, you’ll even see helpful widgets that deliver information about weather or news in your area. That’s because these websites are gathering location, device, and user data so that they can deliver relevant content to people in your specific area.

“Welcome Back” Content

On some websites, you’ll get pop-ups and other messages that welcome you back. Sometimes, these messages even contain specialized offers, or they give you the ability to pick up your browsing where you left off. This is a type of dynamic content designed to provide a more welcoming, personalized experience while moving website visitors further along through the customer journey.

Dynamic Email Content

According to research by HubSpot, 31% of marketers use email marketing as one way to reach buyers. And in many of these campaigns, not all potential customers are receiving the same emails. That’s because savvy marketers use dynamic email marketing to create messaging that is highly targeted to each customer segment — or in some cases, to the individual customer — so that they can create a better, more personalized experience.

Paid Ads

Paid advertisements like those through Google Ads generally feature an element of dynamism, too. In paid ad campaigns, marketers can use customer data to map ads and text ad titles to different search queries. The idea is that users will see paid ads or paid search results that are more relevant to their search engine queries — and that helps marketers boost click-through rates.

What Are Dynamic Content Design Best Practices?

To get started with dynamic content, the first thing you’ll need is a customer data platform (CDP). The CDP should aggregate all of your customer data. From there, you can connect that data to omnichannel marketing efforts to deliver personalized content to individual users.

That’s just the beginning, though. When you’re getting started with dynamic content, it’s best to approach it with the goal of improving user experiences. Read below for a few best practices that will help you accomplish this feat.

Use Dynamic Rules to Cut Down Repeat Conversions

One of the things that makes dynamic content an invaluable tool is that it gives you the ability to create rules for ecommerce sites — and you can leverage this to keep the shopping experience fresh.

So let’s say that your products aren’t the type of consumables that people purchase again and again. When they return to your website, it’s because they want to purchase something different. Problem is, the on-site product recommendations that pop up whenever they visit your homepage display the products they’ve already purchased. 

That’s a repeat conversion — and it’s something you can avoid with a dynamic website. Create rules for your site so that it removes already purchased products from customer shopping recommendations. This way, you can use this space to showcase new, enticing products that repeat customers are interested in.

Help Customers Skip Extra Steps

Sometimes it takes a while for customers to move from the consideration phase of the journey to the conversion phase — and in that time, they might fill their shopping cart with the items that they’re considering. 

Situations like this are a great opportunity for you to use dynamic content to encourage the conversion while improving the customer experience by eliminating extra steps.

Start by setting up shopping carts so that they save items that customers add to them so customers don’t have to re-add things when they return to your site. You can also use dynamic content to woo these returning visitors with personalized offers or recommendations relevant to the items in their carts.

Map Content According to the Customer Journey

One of the most powerful ways to leverage dynamic content is to use it to map content to each stage of the customer journey. The basic customer journey goes through the awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and loyalty stages — and at each stage, marketers work hard to deliver content that is suited to potential customers at that stage.

For example, during the awareness stage, how-to guides and informative content help first-time consumers discover and learn about brands and their offerings. However, during the decision stage, customers are in the process of choosing a product — and thus, they need signup pages, product pages, and pricing information so that they can follow through with their purchase decision.

Using dynamic content to map to each of these stages usually means creating a series of emails that helps move customers from one stage of the journey to the next. This way, you can automate the lead generation and lead nurturing process while delivering customized content to the exact potential customers who need to see it.

However, you can also use dynamic content to deliver customized CTAs and landing pages to customers at various stages of the journey. With this type of strategy, customers in the awareness stage of the lifecycle can be directed to landing pages and information that introduce them to your brand, whereas repeat visitors can proceed a little farther along the journey via product comparisons, pricing information, and other details.

Create Engaging, Personalized Experiences

Another way to deliver dynamic content is through customer experiences that are designed to build engagement. If you’re looking for ideas, check out the experiences that you can create with Jebbit.

For example, if you’re a cosmetics brand, you can use Jebbit to create quizzes or other types of interactive web content designed to help customers find the perfect product. But what if customer data reveals that one customer is more interested in lipstick while another is searching for a great new eyeshadow shade?

That’s where dynamic content comes in. Create and optimize quizzes or experiences that target each of your customer segments so that you can deliver experiences that best suit individual needs and desires.

Get Started With Dynamic Content

If you want to build engagement and boost conversion rates through personalized customer experiences, dynamic content is one of the best ways to do it. And Jebbit offers you a full suite of tools to create a wide variety of interactive experiences that you can use to support dynamic marketing campaigns.

Create surveys, polls, quizzes, personalized lookbooks, and more to delight customers and capture their attention. These experiences are easy to create — and through them, you can collect data that will help you further optimize customer experiences.

It’s easy to get started, too. Schedule a demo, or dive in and begin creating new experiences for free.