Multi-channel Delivery of Personalized Content

April 17, 2023 Stan

Personalized content. It’s a topic brought up often and is an important element of a marketing strategy. When thinking of what makes content ‘personalized’ we can go beyond merging in first name in a salutation. Personalization can be as fluid as the data you are able to collect. The more you know about your audience the more capability you have to present content that is relevant to what they are interested in, deliver it at the right time for optimal engagement, and through the channels they want to receive it from.

The more you know …

Data really is king, especially when you want to utilize personalized content. The more you learn about your audience, the more nimble you can become in how and what you deliver. Web forms are a great way of having your audience tell you more about themselves outside of their name, company, and email address. Adding fields that are relevant to identifying personas, campaign topic areas, and channel delivery is a great way to expand your dataset. It is important to keep this data clean and consistent to make building rules for dynamic content, segmentation, and web personalization easy. You can accomplish this by using picklists and boolean fields like checkboxes or radio buttons for these fields as much as possible.

Dynamic Content

Most marketing automation platforms have personalization capabilities. In Oracle Eloqua, there are many ways to create personalized content. One powerful tool is dynamic content which is a rule-based tool that provides customer-specific content that changes depending on who is viewing it. The rules can use contact, account, and custom object data to detail who should receive each version of the content within an email or an Eloqua landing page. In an email, dynamic content can be used in a subject line, for individual sections of the email, or for the entirety of the message. Example use cases for using dynamic content would be country based where you would like to present the content in different languages based on country. Marketo also uses dynamic content for personalization, being dependent on segments pre-identified in the tool.

Personalized Content with Many-to-One Data

Depending on your data structure, you may struggle with creating personalized content in Eloqua. If you import abandoned cart or shipping confirmation data or have insurance policy and appointment data, you are likely using many-to-one custom objects to store many records mapped to a single contact. With many-to-one custom objects, Eloqua is not able to identify, natively, the correct records to personalize through field merges in an email or landing page unless it is the first or last modified record. A workaround for this problem is the Relationship One Personalization Manager app.

This app has the ability, based on the criteria rules and grouping logic you set, to personalize Eloqua emails, landing pages, and real-time data exports using data from one or many Custom Object records. With this capability, on a campaign canvas, you are able to identify the correct records from your Custom Object to receive an email or export a csv file through SFTP for reporting or other 3rd party external use cases. With Cloud Content configured within the app, you can utilize app generated field merges tied to your Custom Object. These can be used on either an Eloqua email or landing page expediting the build time and ease of use for personalization.

Triggers

Getting your content out at the right time is key in encouraging engagement along the customer journey. Depending on the need of the campaign, you can utilize triggers based on data to add contacts into campaigns when they have taken a specific action or their record is updated with a particular data value. Eloqua and Marketo both allow you to have listeners configured to add contacts to a campaign based on actions like clicking another email, submitting a form, or a field value changing such as lead source.

Paid Media

Paid media ads are a commonly used way of serving up personalized content to visitors to drive form conversions. Like with links in emails, the URL behind a paid media add can include UTM parameters that include important data points like lead source, lead medium, and campaign name which can help not only with reporting on the performance of those ads, but also in adding contacts to follow-up nurture campaigns and as topic areas for content delivery platforms. Conversely, data you have on known visitors, or cookies, help in delivering personalized ads rather than generic ones helping to make your contacts feel like you know and understand their needs.

Content Delivery Tools

Tools like Pathfactory have capabilities to deliver options for related content based on topic areas known about a visitor or previously consumed content. This helps in promoting your content but also in encouraging a contact to continue through the journey towards conversion.

Channel Delivery

As noted earlier, in your forms you can learn from contacts how they prefer to receive messaging from you. This can be done on any form but most likely as part of a subscription preferences page. Channels can include SMS, newsletters, blogs, etc. Depending on what delivery options are available to you as a business, your content can be modified to fit those channels. By sending content in their chosen channel, engagement should be higher and more consistent.

Personalization is such a large topic and can be utilized in various ways throughout your digital marketing campaigns. If you want to learn more or need help in getting started, reach out to us!

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