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Below is our recent interview with Matthew Dunn, CEO & Co-Founder at Campaign-Genius:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Campaign-Genius?
A: Campaign-Genius improves companies’ marketing results by providing personalized, dynamic content from their current email systems and data – instantly, at scale, and inexpensively.
Q: Does this work with existing email/CRM/marketing systems?
A: Definitely! We currently provide built-in tags and fields for over 50 of the largest email, CRM and marketing platforms, including MailChimp, HubSpot, Salesforce, Dotmailer and more. Alternatively, we provide standardized tags that can be used in any system that sends HTML emails or MMS messages.
Q: Does dynamic content require a bunch of development, IT integration or data exports?
A: No, no, and no :-) We aimed this tool at marketers and designers. Creating dynamic-content templates is easier than creating a Powerpoint slide. Using that content within an email campaign is as easy as pasting a one-line HTML tag into the message.
Thanks to standard mail-merge functions in these platforms, each outbound email is its own miniature data export; the email client actually passes data to our server to get back the personalized content for the user.
So if a campaign is sent to 10,000 people, we will generate up to 10,000 unique blocks of content, on the fly – one for each email opened.
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Q: I didn’t realize email content can be changed dynamically after a message is read; how does that work?
A: There are two kinds of content in an email.
One is the message body, which can’t be altered once it’s sent. But email clients will also fetch data from a web server – specifically, images from tags in the message body. You can think of those as “blocks to be filled in” — with pictures, text, or even moving images like GIFs.
We discovered that we could tell email clients how long those images should be cached. So if a message isn’t opened until later…or if it’s re-opened later…we can generate new content, and the email client can replace that block with new content.
The data assets in company email lists have been massively under-utilized. We let them start doing things with that data that actually engage people – not just “Dear Milan” in the body copy.
Q: What’s the value/impact of dynamic, personalized content?
A: Well, Facebook is hovering near half a trillion dollars, and that’s built on dynamic, personalized content if you think about it. Google search results, ditto. Your Amazon page vs mine, ditto. Personalized, dynamic, 1/1 content is the unavoidable direction marketing will evolve.
Dynamic, personalized email content has been done, at scale, and the results are dramatic. Major companies have seen campaign results go up from 2x to 20x! We’re happy to bringing an affordable way for a broader range of companies to see the same kind of gains.
The reason to personalize, and the reason to dynamically update, is to make that content as relevant and as interesting as possible to that individual reader.
More relevant + more interesting = more engaging and more attention-efficient. Of course it’s going to be more valuable.
Q: What can be personalized? What can be changed dynamically? How are updates managed?
A: Campaign-Genius can literally change every single pixel in that content block dynamically, IF the marketer wants to do that. We have a bunch of pieces they can build with – background images, static text, dynamic text, and dynamic image-on-image overlays. There’s also a ton of back-end smarts – date calculation, location awareness, countdown timers, and more.
The interface to manage content updates is built in to each template. You may laugh, but it turns out that the spreadsheet is a terrific tool for managing lists and scheduled events. So our “dynamic management interface” is a web-based spreadsheet, with a ‘time machine’ to see what a template will look like in future updates.
API is on the roadmap, but we’re waiting for customers to tell us in more detail what they want that to do.
Q: How much does this cost?
A: We only charge for images that an email client fetches; that “pay for what you use” model is the fairest approach. Our CPM (cost per thousand impressions) are lower than search-engine ads — under $1/thousand at the top tier.
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Q: Are other companies using dynamic content in email today?
A: Some of the best-known brands in the world have been doing this for a number of years – soda companies, airlines, retailers, the list goes on. This is an inevitable direction for email marketing – it ticks every box about how people actually take in information. It’s more visual, more relevant, more current and more effective.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: We’re in discussions with a number of email service providers — “ESPs”, the industry calls them — about partnerships. Campaign-Genius brings a hugely complementary dimension to the things they already do very well. We’re NOT going into the business of delivering email, but we’re happy to work with companies that do. Agencies are another key focus; email is a speciality, and the companies that focus on that specialty get the best results.
The one wildcard I see on the horizon is expanding into messaging. The engine we built to generate personalized content “at scale” could be transformative in message-based marketing. Google’s new RCS standard is on the way…there are a ton of messaging platforms for consumers and for businesses…and, as before, we can help them deliver more visual, relevant & effective content.
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