Would be great if we had Dynamic Content functionality for emails

What ​@hillarydj said:

We have 8 core products AND additional product licenses, and our team is being asked to build out product-specific onboarding workflows. ​@ssamarth – do you have any insights on what timeframe in the medium term roadmap dynamic content blocks might feasible in email templates? Versions and multiple branches aren’t the answer here sadly.

Hi All, 
The ability to include dynamic content in email templates where content appears based on conditions set by the admin, is currently under evaluation.

​@ssamarth Amazing to hear! Hope to see this progress into development as it would be huge for our digital & pooled CS space.

Fantastic! This would be a huge step forward for our emails (JOs, Group Send, etc.) 🔥

Well darn. Would love to hear the thoughts around why this isn’t feasible, and when it might be revisited.

I see that this has been parked, but I still want to express interest here. We have a lot of products in the mix, and it creates way too many versions to realistically manage if we want to include content just about the products this customer has. Dynamic content as described by the other commenters  — and available in other email tools — would hugely improve our customer journeys. 

Hi All,

We would want to hear from you more on the need for this capability. Can you help understand your perspective in both approaches.
 

Current Approach (A):
Clone a template into multiple versions and use JO rules to send the correct version to each audience.

Proposed Approach (B):
Maintain one template and add conditions directly inside it to dynamically show/hide content based on customer data (Eg: region, product, segment).
 

We’d Love Your Perspective

1️⃣ Day-to-day management

If you had 5+ conditional blocks inside a single template (for example, Region = EMEA, Product = A), would that feel easier or harder to manage over time than maintaining separate versions?

At what point does a single template with many conditions become harder to maintain than multiple versions?

2️⃣ Effort comparison

Today, creating multiple versions requires:

• Cloning templates

• Editing each variant

• Mapping versions in JO

• Updating all versions when something changes

With conditional content, you would have to define multiple conditions logic inside the template instead.

Would that feel like a:

• Significant improvement

• Moderate improvement

• Marginal improvement

Why?

3️⃣ Where does each approach work best?

In your experience, when does each model make more sense?

For example:

• Minor variations (like a regional banner) → One template with conditions?

• Completely different layouts per segment → Separate versions?

• Product-specific onboarding across 5+ products → Which would you prefer?

4️⃣ What would make conditional content manageable long-term?

If we build this, what would you need to make it scalable and easy to maintain?

Looking forward to your thoughts which would help us build this in a way that actually reduces admin overhead, not adds to it 🙌

Hi ​@ssamarth! I think it ultimately comes down to how many versions would be required to achieve the number of possible combinations at play. 

1. 5+ conditional blocks inside of a template sounds easier to manage to me than the equivalent number of versions that would be required. If you’re in a scenario where they could have any combination of those blocks, it quickly scales to an unmanageable number of versions. I think versions are better when there is a low number and the differences are not modular. So different language variations of the same content, for instance, I would still use versions. 

2. I think this would be a significant improvement where there are a lot of potential combinations. In reality, we just entirely avoid using JO in certain ways because it would create too much version complexity. This would unlock ways to use it that we currently just don’t do.

3. a) Minor variations: If it was minor variations like a regional banner, but also say regional spellings in the copy, then I would make versions because it is less modular. If it was just the banner itself I would probably use a condition. 
b) Completely different layouts: I would use versions. 
c) Product-specific onboarding across >5 products: I would use conditionals.

4. I think it would be great if it was a container type within the template editor that you build each conditional version in and then you put criteria into the program when finalizing, as opposed to a liquid markup-style syntax. For me, a lot of it would just be which modules appear or don’t appear based on account products, rather than multiple versions of a module.

Thanks for looking into it!

​@ssamarth, I know we chatted awhile ago, but ​@HMM put it very well too. There are a few big problems caused by the lack of dynamic content containers. And I really like the idea of dynamic containers as opposed to individual blocks. Frequently we’ve got text surrounding an image or button above and below it, and it’d be far easier and less error-prone to manage changes to a single container.

1. One of the big issues we run into in template versions (within a single template) is the waterfall prioritization logic, particularly in cases where there are more than two different versions. At that point, how do we prioritize whether someone gets the default version or one of the additional subsequent variations? The logic gets messy really quickly, there are often cases where we’re forced to choose between two possible options, when the best solution is a combination of two or more containers.
2. Related to template versions -- if we have to create separate email templates to allow us to send different versions within a JO, that quickly adds up, complicating our folder organization, naming issues, reporting, and maintenance.
3. Another issue: JO step limitations. Every time we have to add a separate branch in an evaluate step, and yet another template, each of those adds up, and with the hard cap on JO steps (not to mention potential for errors), this is yet another poor substitute for dynamic content.

Dynamic content would be hugely helpful in solving all of these issues, particularly JO maintenance and reporting.

And whenever we’re working with our counterparts in marketing, the fact that we’re unable to do something so commonly expected of an email platform is frequently a stumbling block.