Zembula's Smart Blocks™ Defined

The Promotions tab has changed how consumers engage with email. Enterprise retailers can’t assume visibility anymore; they have to be proactive.

When every message is an opportunity to deliver real-time, revenue-driving content, volume and send time optimization becomes a competitive advantage.

To do that at scale, you need a system built for it. Dimensions™ is Zembula’s solution for automating real-time personalization across daily enterprise email sends.

Smart Blocks™ are one of the key ways to pull it into action, giving you the ability to add dynamic, revenue-driving content to every email, while improving speed, flexibility, and production efficiency.

What are Smart Blocks™?

Smart Blocks are dynamic content modules that live inside your existing email templates. When a customer opens your email, Smart Blocks automatically populate with personalized content using your live data sources.

They function similarly to Smart Banners™ and Smart Kickers™, but instead of sitting at the top and bottom of an email, these blocks appear within the body of the message.

Set up is simple. Connect your data sources (CRM, ESP, loyalty, eCommerce, etc), drop in a single snippet of code to your existing template, and define which content appears for which readers.

Zembula’s Composition Engine handles the rest. At the moment of open, it checks your parameters, matches the data, and renders the right message — instantly. If something changes in the data, content updates automatically, so there’s no need to pause or re-deploy a campaign.

Built for maximum visibility

Smart Blocks are built for high-frequency, high-volume enterprise retail. That means you can highlight revenue-driving content across your entire audience in real time without creating new templates or waiting on creative revisions. Smart Blocks add relevant personalization of your best-performing messages for both batch and triggered campaigns, ensuring maximum visibility.

Want to display personalized product recommendations, category modules, or merchandizing grids that update in real time? Smart Blocks make it easy to automatically insert that content inside the body of your email, dynamically and at scale.

Adding Smart Blocks to your emails lets you add more relevant messaging tailored to each customer’s interests and behavior without slowing production. See how J.Crew saw a 41x return on ad spend and increased revenue with this approach.

More speed, less friction

Smart Blocks update at the moment of open. That means if your product feed changes or you want to swap in different categories, recommendations, or grids, you don’t need to rebuild templates or slow down production. Merchandising updates apply dynamically, so your team can move faster without sacrificing quality or consistency — which can negatively impact revenue if ignored.

You can feature the right products, offers, or collections inside every email without adding work to the design queue or extending your launch timeline. And because you’re not creating one-off modules or hardcoding changes, QA cycles get shorter too. AI flags potential issues, meaning fewer manual checks, less back-and-forth, and faster time to send.

That’s the kind of speed retail marketers need to keep up with Promotions tab competition.

Measure what actually moves revenue

When you’re sending more emails with dynamic content built into every message, you have more opportunities to test what works, not just what gets opened.

Longitudinal audience testing lets you measure how merchandising strategies perform over time across different customer segments and behaviors. It goes beyond one-off subject line tests or open rates and focuses on the metric that matters: incremental revenue.

With the right testing, you can track how recommendations, categories, or merchandising layouts impact performance and use those insights to refine strategy, not guess based on incomplete data. Here’s why that testing model matters.

Make every message revenue-ready

Smart Blocks help enterprise teams unlock the full revenue potential of every email, not just one-off campaigns. Paired with Smart Banners and Smart Kickers, they give marketers more surface area in every email to deliver personalized, dynamic content inside the Promotions tab.

That means every send becomes an opportunity to feature the right products, drive clicks, and generate incremental revenue at scale, without adding more production overhead.

Request a demo to see how Dimensions can help your brand get started.