Using Content Marketing Automation For Personalization – Litmus

Using content marketing automation for personalization shouldn’t be a challenge. By using existing technology, such as product feeds, marketers can easily achieve automated emails without having to do any heavy lifting (or hours of coding!).

This blog aims to show you how, through automation, you can remove manual processes that hinder email personalization. 

There are plenty of questions people have about automating content. Read on to learn:

• What is content marketing automation?
• How is content automated?
• Email building process
• How does automation work?
• The benefits of content marketing automation
• How to automate personalization

What is content marketing automation?

You’re sure to be automating some of your emails already, whether transactional emails or welcome programs. When we talk about content marketing automation, we’re talking about automating the content in your emails. We find that it’s the content curation—finding and producing the best content to feature in your emails and the time it takes to manually build your emails—that can slow successful email marketing down.

How is content automated?

By using Litmus Personalize powered by Kickdynamic, content in emails update to the latest content automatically, with no manual intervention, based on your product feed or CRM data (such as preferences and a recipient’s current context). Therefore, you don’t need to change the content from email to email—it updates automatically, no changes needed.

Email building process

Here’s a typical build process:

1. You create your email brief based on your strategy
2. You manually source content from your merchandising, web, and social teams
3. You send brief and content to design team
4. You receive a PSD of the email back from the design team
5. The PSD goes to the coding team who manually creates the HTML
6. Create a campaign framework in your ESP (email service provider)
7. Then you test

Then, you want to send but something changes—perhaps a product goes out of stock or a price changes—so you have to go back to the design team and take four steps back.

This is what we call being stuck in the “email build loop”.

Being stuck in the loop can mean that sending an email can take weeks. It also means your focus turns to just getting an email out of the door, sending the same email to all recipients (aka a “batch and blast” approach). Your focus should really be on your long-term goals, including improving your internal efficiency and saving resources with automation, and achieving true, 1:1 personalization to give your recipients a greater experience with your brand while also improving your key metrics, such as conversion and AOV.

With Litmus Personalize, you can automate sourcing your email content by pulling in content via feeds directly into an email. So if your content changes, it is automatically reflected in the email. This drastically reduces your email build time, freeing you up for more important tasks.

How does it work?

Litmus Personalize will connect your content feed such as Google Shopping feed, CSV, JSON or API into your emails. Our tags embed into your HTML template.

The benefits of content marketing automation

Content marketing automation is highly efficient by replacing manual, time-consuming, resource-heavy processes and saves your team time to focus on long-term strategies, creating a new approach to personalization in email. This way, you are able to leverage your existing content sources and repurpose them for email.

How to automate personalization

Litmus Personalize, powered by Kickdynamic connects your content feed to your CRM data stored in your ESP. This data can be explicit (preferences or propensity modeling) or implicit (behavioral including abandoned browse, basket and previous purchases). The content in your email is personalized based on this data.

Email marketing has a long-standing efficiency problem. Sourcing content, designing email, coding HTML, building campaigns into your ESP, testing, and finally sending has been too manual for too long. By automating your email content, you can streamline your processes and send truly personalized emails without having to put in the extra leg work.