Whenever you are working in the drag and drop editor, merge tags are used in the same way personalization tags are used in the legacy editor. Both merge tags and personalization tags use the same shorthand or HTML codes, making them essentially the same things.
When done well, personalized campaigns can impress your contacts and increase your response rates. You can personalize your campaign with merge tags in a number of ways including greeting your recipients by their first name, inserting a company name in the body of your mailing, or including any other information you’ve stored about contacts in the campaigns they receive.
Merge tags use contact fields data
Using merge tags for personalization works in both email and subject lines. Merge tags are placeholders that get replaced with real values at the time the campaign is sent. The real values can represent your account’s contact fields, like first name, email, or the latest item they ordered.
In fact, you’ll find any contact fields that you have previously set up in your account as the top options for your merge tags. Below those, you’ll find 10 preloaded merge tags that are always available in addition to your contact fields.
How to add merge tags to a campaign
Merge tags are only accessed through the text block in the drag and drop editor, but there are 2 ways within the text block to pull up your list of merge tag options.
From an open campaign, go to the text block that you would like to add the merge tag to and click on it. Doing so will bring up the text toolbar where you will see it as an option.
When you click on Merge tags from the text toolbar you’ll see your options populate on the page, as seen in the image above, and then you can select one from there.
You can also bring up your list of available merge tags anytime you are typing inside a text block by using the “@” as a shortcut.
Keep in mind that recently created custom contact fields can take up to 24 hours to show up in your list of available merge tags.
Once you select a merge tag to use via either method, the actual code for it will be placed directly into your copy. In that code, after ‘default’ you’ll see quotation marks that are empty, and you can either leave them empty or add some placeholder text. The placeholder text is there in case the contact you are sending the campaign to has not given the proper information for the field, meaning there is none. In that case, the placeholder text is used instead so there isn’t an obvious gap in your copy.
As with any unique customizations, we always recommend that you send a test of your campaign before sending it out to your entire audience to ensure your merge tags are performing as expected. You can always refer to the 10-point pre-send campaign checklist in this article.