StrongView^® On-Demand Content Blocks

Going Beyond "Dear First Name,"

StrongView On-Demand offers Content Blocks, adding an unprecedented level of relevance to your messages. Content blocks let you automatically insert personalized text and graphics into your messages, and you can also manage and modify your content with minimal effort.

Content blocks use dynamic segments, and text-based tokens to insert into your messages, minimizing the work you need to do to send highly personalized mailings. There are two ways to use content blocks, the first one uses a single template in which you edit the copy and use content blocks to lock down content within a template. The second one makes parts of the template reusable across multiple mailings.

Method 1: Locking Down the Template

Many of you out there have invested heavily in your email template(s). You've had designers re-do the layout and spent countless hours and dollars getting the design just the way you want it. All that remains for each mailing is plugging in the content specific to each mailing.

Now, you can edit the whole template for each mailing, which can introduce rendering issues and/or template breakage or you can identify which parts of the template change for each mailing and tokenize them. Then all you have to do is upload the part that has changed as a content block and reference it using tokens.

This keeps the layout HTML stable while letting you or your copy editors fiddle with the copy as much as you want. When you are done, just upload the content block file and send a test email to see how it all gets assembled. Using this method, you could even have multiple people working on different parts of the copy without having to worry about one person over-writing another.

This method does take a little extra effort to compartmentalize the template and set up the token/content block schema, but that's a one-time cost and moving to this method can greatly improve your content editing process, especially if your template has a lot of moving parts.

Method 2: Reusable Pieces

Maybe you don't have a single template that you use for all of your mailings, but you do have parts that get re-used over and over in different mailing. Things like the mast head or side bar or unsubscribe text. If that's the case, you can start tokenizing the elements that get reused from mailing to mailing.

There are two ways to approach tokenizing the content elements. The first involves creating a single content block file that has all of the reusable elements in it. This option has the benefit of keeping things simple; there's only one one file to keep track of and everything is all in one place. The trade-off is that when a change needs to be made to one element in the content block, you have to edit the file that has ALL of the elements, which could increase the risk of unintentionally modifying one of the other elements.

The second option involves putting each reusable element into its own content block file. Going this route protects you against accidentally corrupting other elements and also lets you use the individual files as building blocks, but it also means keeping track of more files for each mailing.

Once you select how you want to manage the reusable elements, you can easily call those assets from the content block(s) using tokens and then, as in method 1 above, focus on the parts of the email template that change from mailing to mailing.

Whichever method you use, the goal is to make executing your mailings easier, while providing flexibility and control over your content.

If you're interested in learning more about the benefits of StrongView's Content Blocks, please contact us at (877) 263-8285.

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