SendGrid Introduces Dynamic Content for Email Templates

Digital communication platform SendGrid today introduced dynamic content for email templates, allowing users to design and deliver personalized, one-to-one transactional email messages.

Transactional emails contain information that a recipient wants or needs and thus tend to have high open rates, the vendor says. Examples include product recommendations, time-sensitive password resets, purchase receipts, and registration confirmations.

With SendGrid’s new templates, users can customize the content of their transactional emails based on the recipients’ demographics, such as age and location, and include contextual details such as specific products on a receipt and tracking numbers for shipments. Additionally, conditional options in the templates can deliver relevant, targeted message content based on information about the recipient.

The templates also provide native support for Handlebars syntax, a common templating engine. That means that all of the dynamic templating occurs outside of protected code, allowing developers to safely make changes to templates without needing to redeploy code.

“Dynamic content for transactional templates enables customers to seamlessly design and deliver personalized, one-to-one transactional email messages at scale. Now, SendGrid customers can seamlessly optimize message content, reduce development time, and protect code quality,” says Steve Sloan, chief product officer at SendGrid. “Transactional emails like product recommendations, password resets, purchase receipts, and registration confirmations are business-critical because they typically contain information a recipient wants or needs.”

Sloan likens much of today’s email communication with letters sent in the mail—“distant communication because it can’t be real-time or necessarily be tailored effectively.” To be more engaging, email messages “should be more like human communications, completely in sync with the needs and connected to the context of each individual. SendGrid’s dynamic templates help our customers achieve this type of personalized communication at scale,” he says.

Because each piece of dynamic content is “populated on a unique, one-to-one basis,” Sloan says, it can be a challenge to see beforehand what the message will look like to recipients. To tackle that problem, SendGrid developed a Test Data feature to allow users to preview how dynamic messages will appear to customers. The test data, which must be in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format, allows the sender to populate the preview of their template with relevant data, ensuring that each field looks pixel-perfect,” he explains.