3 Ways to Win with Adaptive Content

Here at TowerData, we’ve been trumpeting the importance of personalization for years. But the truth is, in today’s competitive landscape, merely adding a customer’s name to the top of a newsletter simply won’t cut it anymore. When we discuss personalization today, we mean using a data-driven strategy that takes your email marketing to the next level. This means always seeking innovative new ways to engage your prospects.

Cue the next “big thing” in personalization: adaptive content.

What Is Adaptive Content?

The data-driven personalization we all know and love is all about matching elements of content to the customer who is reading your email. For example, adding the customer’s name or making product recommendations based on past purchases. Adaptive content places less emphasis on the content itself and more on the overall experience.

For example, triggered email messages may be a part of your current email strategy. With an adaptive content strategy, when someone clicks on a link in a triggered email, the next email he receives might be different, based on the link he clicked in the previous email. In this case, each subscriber’s experience is unique, and completely based on their behavior and interests. In this way, the messages we create adapt to the person reading the content and creates highly targeted experiences.

How to Build Adaptive Content into Your Email Marketing

Triggered emails, such as shopping cart abandonment campaigns offer a prime opportunity for adaptive content, simply because these campaigns tend to involve multiple email touchpoints. But the real question is, how do you get started incorporating adaptive content into your entire email marketing strategy?

Know your customer. The more information you have on your customers, the better. This typically starts with building out subscriber profiles through the customer data you have on hand as well as third party data. Email intelligence, for example, will help you round out your understanding of your customers.

Map out your customer journey. What steps does a prospective customer take before she buys from your company? Once she buys, what steps does she take until the next purchase? And the next? Before you can create adaptive content, you need to understand everything that happens to your customer, along the buyer journey.

Develop content that can be sliced and diced to fit a range of circumstances. Choose topics carefully, and seek opportunities for new ways to refresh and re-share previously created content. For example, you may have created a piece of content with tips for how to use a particular product you sell. This content might form the basis of a post-purchase series of emails, or it might be helpful to share with customers who share similarities with recent purchasers.

Once you begin to build adaptive content into your email marketing strategy, you can build upon these elements and create truly amazing experiences for your customers. Adaptive content will help you meet objectives such as shortening the sales cycle, increasing order size, improving brand loyalty and much more. With the ability to send the right content to the right person at the right time, the sky’s the limit!

For more insights into using customer data to achieve email marketing success, check out our free guide on Using Subscriber Data to Modernize Your Email Marketing!