by Coralie Meade Rodriguez •
07.25.2018
Senior Production Specialist
she/her/hers
Is your organization looking for a way to make your emails stand out without over-taxing your staff? It’s time to consider conditional content. The more personalized your emails are, the more effective they will be, and many email tools make this easy to do. Curious but not sure where to start? Read on!
The Basics
Conditional content is a way to personalize emails and forms for different audiences. The strategy allows organizations to create multiple versions of a page or email message with content that is specifically relevant to different groups of their supporters. Email tools (such as Engaging Networks, Luminate Online, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud) allow you to create duplicate versions of an original email, and change the text, images, and links so that they apply to the interests, locations, or behaviors of the target audiences. While each tool may use different terms (such as profiles, tags, or groups) the concept is the same.
The Argument
While older generations were loyal to organizations as a whole, recent studies, such as the Millennial Impact Report, have been showing a trend towards cause loyalty. Younger generations are focusing more on supporting specific causes and taking less interest in the organization as a whole. This is just one reason why segmenting your supporters and showing them information they care about is more important than ever. Using segmentation, you can market your programs and actions to groups that care about them while not fatiguing your list. That’s a win/win!
Also, there’s evidence that you can increase your online performance with segmentation. Segmented email campaigns get 14.31% more opens than non-segmented campaigns (Mailchimp) and emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened (CampaignMonitor).
The Examples
Before you send personalized emails you need to segment your audience into separate groups based on a certain set of characteristics or behaviors. A few options are: Those who have participated in an action alert versus those who have not, donors who have contributed at different levels, where supporters live, or if someone has or has not signed up for an event.
Here are a few specific use cases to consider:
- If you have an event coming up that you want to promote in a monthly email, but the content isn’t applicable to your whole audience you can use location segmentation. This allows you to send one version of your newsletter with location-specific content to those in target cities, and another version to everyone else.
- If you just had your annual gala, it is important to thank the supporters who attended. You can use conditional content to send a thank you email and also message those who didn’t attend to show off the results from the event, encouraging them to come next year.
- You can also use conditional content for different donor levels. This is great if you have membership benefits for different donation amounts or if you want to message donors differently depending on how much they’ve given.
We hope you now have a clearer picture of conditional content and how you can use it to improve your email strategy. If you’re interested in learning more about how to use conditional content with your email tool, reach out to us today to get started.
