Merge Tags

Merge tags are extremely useful snippets of code that you can insert into your email body and subject lines to insert personalization.

For example. you have a custom field called "First Name"  and you would like to insert each customer's first name into the emails as they go out.

Merge tags make this very easy, and can even be expanded out to perform more than just basic personalization. You can also use rules to adjust what is shown on each email depending on the data associated with the subscriber.

For example, if you have a GENDER custom field, you could send Hello MR for all males, and Hello MRS for all females.

You can also insert non-subscriber-specific information, like unsubscribe links, the date, and much more.

You can see a list of available merge tags whenever you are editing content. For example, when editing text in the drag-and-drop editor, there is an INSERT drop-down list that contains all of the available merge tags. When editing a WYSIWYG template there is a big "Merge Tags" button towards the bottom of the page.

 

System Merge Tags

Several Merge Tags are built into the system and can be used by everyone. They are as follows:

Custom Field Merge Tags

Any field you create using the platform can also be used as a merge tag. 

When you add a custom field, you will be given the Merge Tag value. Simply insert this into your campaign as follows.

Assuming your custom field is name "Firstname", the merge tag would be: {{FIRSTNAME}}

Conditional Merge Tags

As well as inserting straightforward merge tags, there is also the option to dynamically alter the data that is shown. We call this "Conditional Merge Tags" and they work a bit like a very basic programming language.

Let us say we want to show a "Hello Mr" or "Hello Mrs" at the top of our email, depending on whether the subscriber has a custom field called Gender.

We would write this:

{{#if (eq [GENDER] 'Male') }}Hello Mr{{else}}Hello Mrs{{/if}}

We can use any merge tag or custom field here instead of GENDER.

Let us take it a little further...

If we wanted to say hi to the Ladies, and then Gentleman, but we also have some subscribers that do not have a gender marked against them, we could do this:

{{#if (eq [GENDER] Male) }}Hello Mr{{else if (eq [GENDER] 'Female') }}Hello Mrs{{else}}Hello There{{/if}} 

The above example would show "Hello Mr" to a Males, "Hello Mrs" to any Females, and finally "Hello There" to anyone who hasn't got a gender set.

Nesting

As well as straightforward conditions, you can also nest statements. For example, if you want to show a different greeting to men and women, but also want to show a different message to men who like shoes we could do this.

{{#if (eq [GENDER] 'Male') }}

      {{#if (eq [LIKESSHOES] 'YES') }}

           Hello Shoe Lover!

      {{else}}

            Hello Mr Non-Shoe Lover

      {{/if}}

{{else if (eq [GENDER] 'Female']}}

      Hello Mrs

{{else}}

      Hello There

{{/if}} 

And Or?

The example above details what we call an IF statements, which is going to work for a lot of situations. But what about if we want to add some slightly more in-depth rules. What if we want to include everyone who is male OR everyone who is exactly 30 years of age. For this, we can use an OR statement. 

{{#if (or (eq [GENDER] 'Male') (eq [AGE] '30') ) }}Hello Mr{{/if}}

And now taking it a little further, what about if we want everyone who is female or OVER the age of 40...

{{#if (or (eq [GENDER] 'Female') (gte [AGE] 40) ) }}
            Hello Mr
{{/if}}

You can see we have used a tag called gte above, which stands for "Greater than or Equal To". So in the example above we are saying the gender must be female, OR AGE must be greater than or equal to 40.

There are multiple "Operators" you can use here, instead of gte. They are as follows:

gte: Greater than or equal to
lte: Less than or equal to
lt: Less than
gt: Greater than
eq: Equals
ne: Doesn't equal

And finally, you can also use the word AND instead of OR if you require multiple details to match. For example, in this example, we need gender to be "Male" and age to be 40

{{#if (and (eq [GENDER] 'Female') (eq [AGE] 40) ) }}
            Hello Mr
{{/if}}

Misc Functions

Date Formatting 

You can change the format of any date field by using the following...

{{formatDate CUSTOMFIELD "YYYY-MM-DD"}}

Available values are:

Happy Merge Tagging!