Dynamic Content

Dynamic Content is one of the most useful features in JungleMail. Using this feature, you can generate and personalize email content with a click of a button. In this tutorial, you will learn how to do this.

Understanding Dynamic Content

Dynamic Content is the type of content that is automatically retrieved from a SharePoint library or page and inserted into email content. Dynamic Content, as a feature, can be enabled for a whole section or only for a particular block. As a result, a static section becomes a Dynamic Section, and a static block becomes a Dynamic Block.

• By default, a Dynamic Block/Section is automatically repeated as many times in the email body as there are items (pieces of content) in the content source. For example, if a Dynamic Block is configured to display news posts from a SharePoint page with 4 posts inside, this block will be repeated 4 times (one block per post).
• Dynamic Content is highly customizable. Not only you can specify content sources, but you can also limit the number of content items to be displayed, automatically filter content by subscriber preferences, block email sending if there is no new content etc.

Dynamic Content is perhaps best explained by showing it in action, so let's take a look at the example below.

Configuring Dynamic Content for a section

When Dynamic Content is enabled, it is reflected in the border of a particular Section or a Block, as it will change the color to light blue instead of green.

In this tutorial, we will enable Dynamic Content for a section.

1. Select the section that you want to be populated with SharePoint content. Then, in the Section properties window on the right, select the Dynamic tab and switch the Enable SharePoint content toggle to On.

2. In the pop-up window, browse to the SharePoint list or folder from which you want to include content into your newsletter. Once you have selected the desired list, click OK.

Now, it's time to build a template a bit further. Simply drag and drop the desired blocks to form the section layout. In the example, we are using a 2-column layout with an Image block for a picture, Title blocks to show the Topics and Title of the news, and a Subtitle block to show the Comments.

4. With the layout in place, we need to connect each block to the related column of the SharePoint list that we have selected earlier.

Let's start with the Image Block. Click on the block you inserted and then, in the right panel, select the { Columns } button. In the pop-up window, select the column that contains images, and click Insert.

The result:

Next, we will configure the Title block to display our article Topics and Title. Click the Title block you inserted in your Section, delete the default text and click { Columns }.

The corresponding columns in the Pages list are JMTopics and Title, so we select them in each Title block and click Insert.

Finally, we configure the Subtitle block to display the actual content of the article. Select the Subtitle block, delete the default text, and click { Columns }.

Browse to the column that contains the news content click Insert.

The resulting section after the configuration:

Adding conditions (optional)

5. To filter out irrelevant content, you can add conditions to the Dynamic Section. Let's take a look at how to set this up. Let's add the following condition.

Article Date | is greater than or equal to | formula | Today - 7

This condition filters the articles and returns only those that were published in the last week. "Today - 7" is a formula, and you can learn more about JungleMail formulas here.

6. You can also add sending conditions to your automatic campaigns. In the example, if no recent news is found in the list, the campaign will not be sent.

Previewing the result

To preview your newsletter, go to the Preview step. Here, the Dynamic Content has already been processed and you will be able to see what it would look like.

If you are happy with your result, you can save this template for future use. This way your actual newsletter will be updated with new and matching articles automatically. However, if you want to review or use the Dynamic Content in the email builder itself, you can do this by simply clicking the round-arrows icon. This will then immediately load the Dynamic Content from your selected SharePoint list.

Result after processing:

Please note that after using Process Dynamic Section, Dynamic Content becomes static. It means that you can edit this content as you like: move it, replace it etc. If you save this template with the intention to use it later, keep in mind that it will not reflect any changes that may have occurred in the SharePoint list. To save a template with Dynamic Content configuration intact, undo the processing changes and save the template without processing the section.