Why dynamic content is essential to gain more conversions for your business

One of the most powerful tools in a company's marketing arsenal is dynamic content. This term is used to describe content that is personalised to each website user's individual preferences, needs, and on-site behaviour.

Take Amazon for example. The e-commerce site displays different products every time you visit it. It factors in your recent searches and purchases to display products it decides are more relevant to you and hence are more likely to be purchased. Video streaming sites like YouTube, HotStar, and Netflix do the same thing with their ‘suggested’ sections. They follow your activity on their sites and offer you tailored content that will draw the most engagement.

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According to a study by Janrain, 74 percent of online consumers get frustrated with websites when content appears that has nothing to do with their interests. This isn't limited only to on-site content. It also includes offers, ads, and promotions that appear in the form of pop-ups or remarketing efforts. For example, if you're visiting a site from India and an ad pops-up announcing ‘free shipping across the US’, you'll almost certainly leave the site and look for other options to buy what you were searching for. The first site may have had an option to ship in India, but by showing you irrelevant information, they just lost a potential customer.

Marketers can leverage the technological advancement of major ad networks like Google and Facebook to display personalised product recommendations on the social media sites where their potential customers will most definitely see them. A study by Monetate found that personalising web experiences resulted in marketers’ observing a 19 percent increase in sales.

While using dynamic content on websites is fairly common these days, one platform which marketers miss out on is email. The second most common reason for people unsubscribing from marketing emails is the lack of relevant content (the first being too many emails flooding their inbox). Personalised emails were also found to deliver six times higher transaction rates as compared to generic emails. It stands to reason, then, that personalised dynamic content is a must in every email marketing strategy. Surprisingly though, only 30 percent of retailers send personalised product recommendations via email. By not incorporating dynamic content in your emails, you not only run the risk of losing subscribers, you're also losing out on potential customers by the dozen.

There are still more reasons to employ dynamic content in your marketing strategy. PR Daily found that only 10 percent of consumers did not find custom content useful, and 78 percent believe that organizations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships with them. This plays in your favour when potential customers must choose between your business and its competitors.

Dynamic content, then, must clearly be leveraged to get the most out of your marketing efforts. But one thing marketers need to be careful while using dynamic content to convert leads is how they are using an individual's data.

The data used to drive dynamic content marketing falls into two categories: permission-based and anonymous. Permission-based data includes all the information that a website visitor willingly provides to the company through sign-up forms and other similar web elements. Anonymous data, on the other hand, includes information collected by web sites without the visitor's conscious knowledge. One example is obtaining the location attached to an IP address. A detailed survey by Janrain found that while most consumers vehemently want to be shown personalised data, 77 percent would trust businesses more if they were transparent about how they're collecting and using their information.

Marketers and customers are in tandem about the use of dynamic content then. Both parties acknowledge its advantages and are intent on seeing more of it being used. So, if you aren’t already, it’s high time you incorporated dynamic content into your digital marketing strategy to gain more conversions for your business.