This is part 3 of the series “Targeting The Customer“, a 5-part series on using marketing automation to target customers and improve marketing effectiveness.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we discussed the role and methods of profiling customers and prospects.  Yet obtaining valuable data about the interests and habits of a customer or prospect is useless unless that data can be utilized to target market the customers and prospects.  As profile data can become quite voluminous, it quickly becomes impractical to manually target customers based on individual profile data.  Rather, marketers should focus on creating and sending dynamic content to their customers and prospects.

Dynamic Content is creating marketing content that dynamically changes in real-time based on the end recipient’s profile.  Dynamic content is most often utilized in email marketing, but can also be used on web sites, and in other forms of direct marketing such as SMS.  In essance, Dynamic Content allows specific content areas to be set based on demographic profile data.  The content can be created cross-demographic, so as to allow for individual users who fit multiple profile attributes to get their own distinct version of the content.

Let’s take a sporting goods store sending out a weekly email with its special sale items for the week as a simple example.  In order to maximize the content that it sends, the store decides to include products relevant to the end recipent in the email (to entice interest) and provide a link to the full weekly circular in the email.  The store sets up content for each of its major sports: baseball, basketball, football, golf, hockey, and soccer, and ties them to interest fields that it has collected through profiling.  The Dynamic Content system will match up customers based on the data, and send out the relevant content.  So recipient 1, who is interested in baseball, golf, and football will receive information about those three sports, while recipient 2, who is interested in golf and basketball, will receive the sales relating to products in those two sports.   Note that recipient 1 and recipient 2 have an overlapping interest (golf).  The marketer who is setting up the content only sets up each sport interest once, but both recipients receive it as part of the overall content piece.  A Dynamic Content system will merge the appropriate pieces of content based on the profile data gathered.

By targeting the customer in this way, it makes it more likely that the customer will see items that interest them, and lead to more user interaction and more sales.  As the user makes purchases and engages in more interaction, it is critical that the profile continually be refined, the topic of part 4 of this series.

Related posts:

1. Response To The Content: Triggers and Refining the Profile
2. Capturing Data: Technologies Available to Profile Your Customer
3. Targeting The Customer: A Five-Part Series
4. Profiling Your Customer Improves Marketing Potential