Personalization helps turn your campaigns into personal emails. Such campaigns are read more often, and they rarely get into spamboxes.
Your emails can be personalized with the help of segmentation (to whom we write) or substitution (what we write). Segmentation was discussed in Tutorial №3, that’s why here we will mostly discuss substitution.
Substitutions are special variables — merge tags — in double curly brackets. In the email, the merge tag is substituted by the corresponding data.
To personalize your email, any additional field from your contact list can be used. To have a particular value substitute the merge tag in your email, an additional field must be filled in. You can fill them in while importing contacts, subscriptions, or manually.
More about setting additional fields values
To see the list of additional fields and corresponding merge tags for substitution, go to Contacts — Additional Fields.
If there is no field you need in the list, you can create it, then import the contacts with this field filled in.
Examples of merge tags variables usage
The name in the email: “Anthony, your purchase is arriving today”, “Everyone called Andrew will get 50% discount today”.
The name of the item: “You have purchased Stels XT280 bicycle recently, and we would appreciate it so much if you left your feedback”, “Look what we have found for your iPhone 5”.
The name of the city. “Discounts for New York citizens”, “Delivery options in Brooklyn”.
The number of your order, login, promotion code, or other important information. “Your login: Odin111”, “Your order number: 112345abc”, “Your promotional code for the next purchase: 67SALEt”.
Substituting a merge tag in the campaign
In the email subject
Click on the Personalize button next to the topic when you are sending the campaign and choose the appropriate substitute.
You can as well copy the substitute from the Additional Fields section and insert it into the subject field.
In the email body
Create an email following the guidelines from the Tutorial №5.
Point the cursor at the place you want to add your variable to and click on the Merge Tags button in the toolbar.
In the new window, choose the merge tag by the name.
Q&A
What if not all the contacts from my contact list have the needed fields filled in?
Add the substitute text after “|” in curly brackets in case the field is empty. For example, to add a name, choose {{Name}}. If the Name field is empty, substitute the name with the text “Dear client” — {{Name|Dear client}}.
How to check the substitute text if it is not shown in test emails?
The functionality of the test email is intended to check the layout of your email and doesn’t correlate to the contact lists, that’s why substitutes doesn’t work in them.
To check your substitutes, create a test contact list, add your email address to it, and send the campaign.
Can personal names or the names of the cities be changed in forms in substitutes?
No, the merge tags are substituted in the forms given in the additional fields of a particular subscriber.