Dynamic content lets you build a positive and personal relationship with your readers, with the help of interactivities, multimedia, navigational buttons, and other elements that fit into a reader-centered approach.
Magazine publishers are always striving to increase their readership. Their digital magazines, perhaps, must lead a reader-centric approach per se. To make publications more reader-centered, giving the reader an ability to access and consume content in their own, personal way is of paramount importance. For readers, this creates a sense of control over what-when-how to consume content that increases the level of satisfaction with the reading experience. The more personalized the reading experience, the more trust publishers build. The higher the trust levels, the higher the chance of conversions. Are you wondering how to tap into this? A good rule of thumb is to use dynamic content alongside smart interactivities in digital magazines. Consequently, it all boils down to the magazine software and its features that let you create such impactful magazines.
What is dynamic content?
In our business, dynamic content is a term that describes an advanced User Interface (UI) that makes the reading experience richer with intuitive fingertip controls. For instance, a reader clicks on ‘Read More’ to dive deeper into details whilst reading about a particular thing. A dynamic magazine lets the reader navigate effortlessly with UI elements such as a table of content, buttons, sliders, widgets, and others. Since these are consistent, they make the magazine app or website more predictable and the brand more recognizable. This also helps decrease cognitive overload, which is crucial for readers today with shorter attention spans due to technology.
The aim is to simply provide a more personal experience to the reader. To do so, here’s a list of factors to consider for a personalized experience.
- Ability to access content on any screen device
- Ability to consume content from any location and at any time
- Ability to engage with interactivities and different forms of multimedia
- Ability to dive deeper into details via links for videos, PDFs, any document, et al.
- Ability to share a block/ an issue on social media platforms in a single click
This could be the purchasing criteria for a magazine software. Since many are already using magazine creation software, does it allow you to accomplish the above-mentioned points? Let’s find out if your software offers to help increase readership with dynamic content.
Top 7 features of dynamic content creation platform
Responsive design layout
Nothing beats the HTML5 responsive web design feature when it comes to catering to various screen readers. Content that’s built on this ‘fluid’ layout dynamically changes to fit any device screen size and orientation, whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. This way your readers can freely access and interact with your digital magazines, independent of the device.
Interactivities
Since personalization is at the core of dynamic content, interactive elements in magazines can help create a more personalized experience to keep your readers stay engaged in a non-invasive way, and eventually lead them to the final stage of conversion.
Some dynamic interactivities include:
- Click-to-reveal lets the reader access a plethora of information in a single click
- Dynamic pop-ups shed light on their desired content topic
- Hotspots let readers view more content when they hover on the button
- Jump links help readers jump to a block in a single click
- The layered content feature makes the page appear dynamically by overlapping content with a 100% knockback or partial knockback feature.
Multimedia
With the multimedia feature, your readers get the choice to listen to background music whilst reading an issue. That’s one way to leverage multimedia to hone their attention span. On the other hand, you can incorporate remote videos from YouTube, Vimeo, BrightCove, or other external sources, for a visually-rich user experience. You also get the option to make an audio playlist that your readers can access through a drop-down present on the same screen with a single click.
Social sharing
This feature allows the reader to share an embedded video, screenshot, link, or document with their peers via social media whilst reading the magazine. Social sharing is one of the powerful marketing tools to reach a wider audience, gain credibility, generate more revenues; many more benefits.
Global search
The experience is rich when it’s effortless. A global search on magazine apps or websites helps the reader find every piece of content based on the keyword or term desired. It reduces the time spent scrolling the content and displays the relevant content in two clicks – search and result.
Feeds
This feature updates content in the feeds when the reader swipes down on the screen, showcasing dynamic content in one swipe. This feature is most beneficial for those who publish content daily, for instance.
Bookmark
When a reader likes a piece of content and wants to save it for the future, he would love to bookmark it. You can give a space for a bookmark icon on the top right corner in the magazine app or responsive web page. This will enable your readers to instantly flag a block while reading dynamic content.
Direct order placing
Magazines already sell content and showcase opportunities. How about if they also allow the readers to place an order directly through the point of interaction? This is dynamic content! Let’s assume there’s a beauty magazine, and the reader wants to purchase one product that he eventually started liking while reading about it. Showing the reader an option to ‘add to cart’ or ‘buy now’ would certainly be an unforgettable experience for him and he may even become one of your mouthpieces!
There are many more ‘non-invasive’ ways to provide contextual help that leads your readers deeper into content at their own pace. It helps you to connect with the readers more personally, grabbing their attention and strengthening your brand positioning. Well, that’s more to this. There are several advantages to adapting dynamic content on your app or site. The following is the list of benefits of using dynamic content.
Benefits of dynamic content
- Personalized experience: Dynamic content enables you to create highly personalized experiences.
- Shorter buyer journey: Dynamic content prevents readers from going through unnecessary steps in discovery and interaction, accelerating the overall experience closer to the deal.
- Increased relevance: Showing relevant content to readers helps decrease the bounce rate and increase the revenue.
- Higher engagement: Deliver content that matters the most, and you can drive more reader engagement and beneficial results.
- Improved user experience: Intuitive controls at the fingertip, without compromising the design and layout of the magazine, help improve user experience.
Dynamic content can potentially offer you more than this. Once implemented, you’ll enter a new space that binds people with stronger digital strings. It all boils down to how you run a reader-centered approach to creating connections with the readers. While responsive web design is helpful, a standalone site or app may not guarantee a large number of visitors. Instead, additional tools and plug-ins like emails, ads, social media platforms, etc. help in increasing the number of visitors.
This means you can display your content dynamically in and around your application to keep the readers engaged by presenting them with the logical next in their discovery process, and eventually converting them into potential consumers. All you need is a clear structure on how to employ dynamic content that will help them throughout their stint on your site or app.
How to strategically use dynamic content in and around your app?
Your marketers can use dynamic content in each stage of the buyer’s journey, from awareness to user engagement to conversion. Let’s have a look at effective marketing strategies to implement them and derive more business benefits.
Stage 1: Awareness
Email Campaigns:
Creating awareness and generating potential leads from email campaigns is one of the key metrics that determine marketing success. Leveraging dynamic content in the outreach phase can potentially drive better CTR. All you need is user data based on trackable metrics such as the stage of their buying journey, preference, and demographics. Customize email templates, titles, and body content to make them more relevant to the user. This approach can be used for registration, subscription, or completing a purchase.
Targeted Ads:
You can use dynamic content in ads to display concise and relevant information for the reader to proceed with the next step. Mag+ allows you to designate spaces in your apps where you can serve ads dynamically. Besides customizations, ads should be displayed ‘in-the-moment’ to increase the relevancy of the ads to readers, resulting in better CTR.
Stage 2: Engagement
Site search with dynamic content:
Better on-site navigation for the readers helps them to reach the pages of interest. This helps you with better engagement and increased total session time. Most importantly, it provides you with more time and opportunities for conversions.
Recommendation engine:
A good recommendation engine can present options that inform the readers about advanced solutions to their queries. For example, you can use it to upsell a higher value license of a product that a customer uses.
Pop-ups
You can use intelligent pop-ups to display dynamic content at the right time, such as when a reader shows an exit intent, spends significant time on the page, or simply scrolls or clicks. You can get a lot of conversions by simply having pop-ups play their role. For example, they can be used for a perfectly-timed discount offer or subscription offer.
Stage 3: Conversion
Dynamic banners:
Contextual banners pinned to web page header sections offer bright and colorful visuals that are the first point of interaction for the reader. Thanks to the dynamic content script, these messages can be customized, based on the reader’s previous engagement with the site.
Intelligent chatbots and sign-up forms:
Chatbots are the last leg of the conversion or upsell funnel. You can use chatbots to simplify their experience. If a reader has spent enough time on your app/site, shown interest in your content, and arrived at the decision part – signing up forms or chatting with the bot – it indicates their strong intent to purchase.
Dynamic CTAs for ALL stages
Making proper use of CTAs by using the information on a certain reader can significantly reduce friction in the UX. CTAs usually represent stages in the sales funnel; however, you can also display different CTAs on each funneling area that would increase their chances of conversion.
Conclusion
There are, undoubtedly, many more ways and practices for utilizing dynamic content to boost conversions by creating a more user-friendly, personal, and intuitive UI and UX. The proliferation of dynamic content is one of the online marketing trends, and we can expect from it a more simplified, advanced, and powerful way of working towards business goals. Therefore, it is necessary to start investing in dynamic content solutions and technologies.
Dynamic content delights customers and leveraging it will make your brand more trusted for them to do business with. Does your platform allow you to create a more reader-centered experience for the readers? Our platforms do! It can help you advance the UI with the help of a responsive design layout and modern interactivities. Such as auto-deleting, writing in different languages, adding image sequences, and much more. You’ll get a range of new features and authoring tools that’ll make your readers do more than just consume digital magazines, and eventually increase readership. Do you want to explore new business opportunities? Get in touch with us today.