Here is Why you Should Insert Live Content Into Your Emails

What is live content

Did you ever send an email marketing campaign and quickly realized that one of the product featured was out of stock? Or do you sell weather-sensitive products and you’re never sure when to send your emails because the weather is so uncertain, and differ for each contact of your list? Live content technologies are here to prevent you from doing this ever again.

In email marketing, using live content technologies allow you to adapt your email’s content to real-time data. It’s kind of like bringing your static emails back to life. No more frozen content, with live content technologies your email’s message can be modified after the email is sent. And it can adapt to any real-time data: device, location, weather conditions, your website’s data, your CRM, an API, you name it.

With live content technologies you ensure your emails are more relevant and up-to-date. See your transactional emails, your customers expect them and read every single one of them, right? Do you know why? Because they are highly personal, they really are one-to-one emails. Now, what if you could do the same with email marketing?

Adapting your emails to real-time contextual data

The first data you can adapt your email’s content to is context. Location, weather conditions, temperatures, device… Context is the environment of each recipient at the moment-of-open matters and can significantly influence one’s buying decision. So adapting your email’s content to each recipient’s context in real time is crucial.

Let’s say you have a website and a mobile app. With live content technologies, you can adapt your email’s content to each recipient’s moment-of-open device. This could translate with a banner to download your app for people opening on mobile, and another one redirecting to your website for people opening on desktop.

And it’s all about real-time data. Meaning that if one recipient opens first on mobile he’ll see the banner to download your app, and if he opens this email again but on desktop, he won’t see this banner anymore but another one, inviting him to visit your e-shop. And it goes on and on.

Location is another interesting contextual data. Live content technologies detect your recipients location at each open of your email. Once again, it has nothing to do with a database where your recipients would have given you their address, it’s real-time data. Every time someone opens your email, the technology gets the location data.

This is particularly interesting if you have a web-to-store strategy but not only. What it consists in is simple: you insert a map into your email and at each open, the map will be updated to display the opener’s location and the closest store to this location.

Adapting your emails to real-time external data

Live content technologies not only allow you to adapt your email’s content to your recipient’s context but to any web data source actually.

As mentioned in the beginning of the article, stock can be a real pain point for some retailers, and receiving out-of-date emails is really frustrating for your recipients. With live content technologies you can insert any data from your website directly into your email, and it will be updated in real-time at each open of your email.

Let’s dive in this stock example. You could use a particular page of your site, like the “Bestsellers” one, and choose to display the first four products. Every time someone will open your email, live content technologies will look at your site and display the first four bestselling products — and if one runs out of stock, it will automagically be replaced by the 5th bestselling product, and so on.

Now let’s say you run an hotel, you could use live content technologies to pull your listing’s availability from your website to insert it into your email — see the example below. This doesn’t work for rooms only, sport stadiums, theaters, airline or train companies could also use this to display up-to-date seats, no matter when your email is opened.

Have you ever used a live content technology before? If not, which data would you be interested in inserting into your emails so it’s updated in real-time?

Originally published on Medium

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