Leveraging dynamic variables like first name, a location, or a relevant product/category name is a great way to help drive better performance - but like most things, you don’t want to overdo it. When you’re using our self-service capabilities, you may wonder if—and how—you can incorporate dynamic variables into your Variant generation process. While self-service doesn’t currently support personalization and other dynamic variables, there are still a few ways you can get Variants to include your desired variables.
How to Get Variants with Variables
Regardless of whether you’re improving or generating content, the following best practices apply:
Include variable placeholders (as opposed to actual variable values) in your control and/or keyphrases to get options with variables back. (e.g., [first name] instead of John)
Before deployment, make sure this variable matches the variable as it actually appears in your deployment platform/ESP.
Including a variable in your input doesn’t guarantee that it will appear in every Variant; our machine is always optimizing for performance, brand voice, and campaign goal, so it will give you a variety of options to choose from.
Last but not least, keep in mind that our self-service capability isn’t designed to be a testing platform (i.e., it’s not going to automatically create a Variant structure with and without variables); Portal is designed to produce Variants that will perform. That being said, if you’d like to deploy Variants in an A/B test, that’s up to you!
Improving Content with Variables
When you’re improving upon a message, include your variable as it would be typically formatted (e.g., %%firstname%%, <First Name>, {first name}) in your control message.
When you click ‘Generate,’ you should see the variable incorporated into some of your Variant options. If you’re exclusively looking for options with variables, go ahead and save only those for deployment.
Generating Content with Variables
When generating content from scratch, including a variable in your ‘Other Content Considerations’ details will produce some Variant options with that same variable. Because our ‘Generate’ function is producing from an even wider array of possibilities, you may see less options here than with the ‘Improve’ function—but you should still save and deploy the Variants you’d like to put into market as usual.
Ensuring Proper Setup and Deployment with Variables
Once you’ve selected the Variants you’d like to deploy, there are additional steps you can take to ensure that the variables render properly to your audience:
Double check that you are using the right variable specific to your platform, and specific to the value you’re hoping to pull.
Make sure that you have fallback logic in place. This will be specific to your processes, but is important to define and QA to ensure that the message reads fine with and without the variable populating. Sometimes the fallback will be blank, otherwise it will be a generic term. But ensure you define it so you don’t end up with a poor customer experience.
Want more information like this? Check out other best practices here.