Streamline Content Marketing with Pardot's Dynamic Content

Dynamic Content is perhaps the best Pardot feature for Content Marketers who are limited on time. Let’s face it, isn’t everyone? Here are my learnings and top tips from using it and implementing it for customers from a range of industries.

1) Plan! A truly effective use of Dynamic Content will require careful planning, it really pays off. When working with UWE Bristol on an Engagement Journey for their International students, I carefully plotted out the dynamic content regions in each of the 7 emails. Each email contained multiple dynamic sections and when we did the maths, there were over 1500 possible options across the journey. Using Dynamic Content meant that over the course of the year, changes were easily managed and made quickly. Click here to download a free copy of my planning sheet

2) Make use of the HTML option. If you’re comfortable with code, this will give you the best possible results. You should always make sure that each variation is more or less the same length of text or size of image, but using the HTML code option can guarantee it.

3) Fit content to the same space within a table and this can then be dropped into existing regions with maximum consistency and fewer issues during testing. Images are easily done by scaling them before upload, but with text look at character length and the way it sits in that block.

4) Reuse content. Elements such as banners or offers can be effectively used across multiple emails and webpages. You could even make these match ads that you are serving elsewhere to reinforce key seasonal images. The same Dynamic Content code can be used in multiple places, making it easy to update.

5) Use a naming convention. This will help massively when you need to find a certain element to update. If you can, include the email name too, or use the planning sheet linked above to keep a more in-depth record. My go-to naming convention when adding dynamic content to Engagement Journeys is “Journey Name | Email Number | Brief Description”.

6) Test everything! This is a given, but especially important with Dynamic Content. Test the formatting every time you use it in a new template and when creating a new email, you should test all variations.

To do this efficiently, I would recommend creating a test list which includes a prospect that matches each variation. These can of course all be your email (or variations of!) and as a bonus tip I would say to name them with the field variation. For example, if you were testing a variation on city then prospects could be called ‘Manchester, Birmingham, London etc.’ with a city to match. That way, if you include a first name variable tag in the email, you can quickly see whether each prospect has received the correct variation.

Written by Safiyyah Gareeboo, Marketing Consultant