Improve email engagement rates with dynamic content

Marketing Product Intermediate

Made by Segment

Made by Vero

In this recipe, you will learn to leverage Segment and email marketing tool such as Vero to personalize your email campaigns with dynamic content in order to improve your engagement rates.
What do you need?
  • Javascript or Mobile source with eCommerce funnel related events
  • An email marketing tool - we're using Vero in this recipe
Improve email engagement rates with dynamic content
Start with Segment

As an email marketer, you know the very important role personalization plays in your campaigns. In fact, 74% of marketers feel that personalization boosts their overall customer engagement rates.

If we zero in on the emails specifically, personalized CTAs are 202% better at converting subscribers than generic ones, and what’s more, is that custom subject lines bring 50% higher open rates. And that’s just among the myriad of success stories from marketers that have used personalization to create custom emails.

In this recipe, you will learn to leverage Segment and email providers such as Vero to send timely and relevant emails to users based on their activity on your website.

What does personalized content look like in an email? For example, for a clothing store, it might notify a subscriber that an item that they’re interested in is now on discount. And in the same email, make recommendations towards similar items that they might like.

Or perhaps a language-learning app might include personalized content related to a subscribers’ learning progress, or suggestions on what they can do to improve.

With personalization, you can boost engagement and conversion rates, as well as vastly improve customer experiences with your brand. And this recipe will teach you how to personalize your emails by harnessing the power of dynamic content.

Step 1: Enable Vero Destination on your Segment Source

This recipe assumes you have an active Source with Segment that’s collecting customer events. If not, check out our documentation here.

The first step is to activate the data you’re collecting with Segment inside Vero. Here are the steps to enable Vero Destination on your Source:

  1. Go to your Connections dashboard and click Add Destination button

  2. Search “Vero

  3. Select Vero > Configure Vero

  4. Add your Vero API Key and Auth Token

  5. You can find your unique API key and Auth token by logging in to your Vero account and navigating to Settings > Project Details.

Check out these docs if you need further help or have any questions.

vero-catalog-search vero-destination-setup

Once you enable the Destination, your customer data starts flowing into Vero. To verify the data is making it to Vero navigate to the Logs page inside your Vero dashboard — here you'll be able to view the activity data streaming into the platform.


You can also view the metadata attached to each event by selecting the specific log.


Step 2: Build a workflow campaign inside Vero

Workflows provide you with the visibility and tools to design and manage your customer messaging experience. With a clear view of all the logic, action steps and message content, you and your team can feel confident in designing your customer journey and ensuring the right message is delivered at the right time.

Each new workflow starts with an Entry Trigger, and you can choose from different logic and actions to build your customer messaging journey. You can send both email messages and mobile push notifications within one workflow.

Here are the steps to create a new workflow:

  1. Select an Entry Trigger In order for a customer to enter a workflow, they must trigger an event. Vero defines events as all the actions a customer takes on your site. It could be everything from signing up for an account, purchasing an item or viewing a page.

  2. Add logic and action steps All workflow steps can be easily added and moved around using drag and drop, giving you full control over the order of filters, branches, delays, emails and push notifications. This allows you and your team to quickly create and update your customer journeys.

  3. Add your email content You can add four types of email content in Vero including Drag and Drop, HTML, Rich Text and Plain Text. You can leverage the pre-built drag-and-drop email template for a welcome email in this case.

  4. Add a conversion goal You can measure the overall success of a workflow by adding a conversion goal. A conversion goal is reached when a customer triggers the specified event. By default, the goal is tracked for up to 30 days after the contact exits the workflow.

  5. Save and publish your workflow Once you’ve reviewed the configuration steps, simply save and publish your workflow to start your customers on their journey!


Check out these docs to learn more about creating a workflow in Vero or watch the video below.

Step 3: Personalize your email content

You can personalise your emails with dynamic content such as recommendations, usage metrics etc. The dynamic elements of an email can be defined using merge tags in the content. Vero uses an open-source language called Liquid, created by Shopify, for this. It offers a huge amount of flexibility to customize your messages, and it can often save you from syncing additional data to your email platform – allowing you to create more engaging and relevant content, faster.


If you have a global user base, you can localise your emails based on the language of your customers and subscribers using the multi-language feature in Vero.


You can even the personalization step further by sending the emails or push notifications to the custom audiences based on their timezone.


You can read more at our liquid guide here:


In order to measure the success of your personalization efforts, you can take a look at three main metrics: open rates, click-through-rates, and conversion rates.

Which one should you focus on? It all depends on the elements that you’re looking to personalize. 

For example, if you are personalizing subject lines in reference to user languages, segments, and behaviors - then the success metric to pay attention to is the open rate. 

And if the elements that you are personalizing are copy, images, and CTAs - then the metrics you should keep an eye on click-through-rates and conversion rates. 


Wrapping up

Here’s what we’ve done in this recipe:

  • The first thing we’ve done is ensured that the data we’ve collected with Segment is flowing to Vero. We’ve done this by enabling Vero Destination on your Source.

  • Next, we built a workflow campaign in Vero. We did this by starting with an entry trigger, then choosing from the various logic and actions to build your customer messaging journey. Then, we added email content and conversion goals.

  • Finally, we personalized our email campaigns with Liquid, an open-source language by Shopify. By saving you from syncing additional data to your email platform, it helps you to create more engaging and relevant content, faster.