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How to add personalization to drag and drop campaigns

Personalization overview

Personalization is when you add specific information about the person or organization who is receiving your email campaign to the actual content of the mailing. It can be as simple as adding their first name to the greeting, which helps to reassure the recipient that your email wasn’t sent by a bot and that you are genuinely interested in creating a relationship with them.

When done well, personalized campaigns can impress your contacts and increase your response rates. You can personalize your campaign in a number of ways, such as 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.

Always send a test of your campaign before sending it out to your entire audience to ensure that your personalization tags are working as expected.

Personalization tags, sometimes referred to as “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. You can also use personalization tags in the subject line, sender email, and reply-to email.

If you use personalization for the sender email or reply-to email, the default value must be a valid email address.

For information about using personalization in the legacy* editor, check out this article.

How to add personalization to a campaign

Personalization tags can be used in Paragraph, List, Title, and Button blocks. To add personalization to your campaign, click on one of these blocks and drag it to the desired spot in your campaign. Then, follow the steps below:

  1. Click inside the block to edit it, then click on the Personalize icon within the toolbar.
  2. In the pop-up window, use the dropdown menu to select the desired field for personalization. Then type the desired default value into the corresponding box. The default value acts as placeholder text in case a contact has an empty field. In that case, the placeholder text is used instead so that there isn’t an obvious gap in your copy.
  3. Click Add field to return to your campaign. You should now see the completed personalization tag in the block.

Recently created custom contact fields can take up to 24 hours to appear in your list of available personalization tags. You can still use that field by manually typing the personalization tag directly into the block.

How to add personalization to a subject line, sender email, or reply-to email

On the Review page, you can personalize the subject line, sender email, or reply-to email; you can also do this from the Send test pop-up window. To add personalization to your subject line, simply click on the subject line field and type the appropriate personalization tag in the desired location of your copy. To add personalization to your sender email or reply-to email, click on the corresponding field and type the appropriate personalization tag.

When using personalization tags for the sender email or reply-to email, you must use a valid email address as the default value or your email will not be able to send.

Advanced personalization options

In addition to personalizing a campaign with data from your contact records, you can personalize with links that allow your contacts to manage their preferences, opt-out of mailings, confirm their subscription, and link to a signup form. These options are also listed in the Personalize dropdown menu and selecting one will insert that functionality as a link right in your content. You can also add these as hyperlinks behind text – just type or paste one of the below tags into the URL field.

To create a link to manage preferences, use: [% manage %]
To create a link to opt out, use: [% optout %]
To create a link to confirm subscription, use: [% optin_confirm_url %]
To create a link to your default signup form, use: [% signup %]

You can find a list of other common personalization tags in this article and this article.

Create and add personalized URLs

You can also create personalized URLs (PURLs) for your recipients. PURLs are commonly used to link to a contact-specific web page or promotion, where each contact has a unique ID that completes a URL. They work in any location where you would normally add a link in your campaign.

PURLs use a type of personalization tags called “double bracket” tags; standard personalization uses “bracket-percent” tags. Double bracket tags have some unique qualities that are important to keep in mind when creating PURLs:

  1. Double bracket PURLs will track clicks.
  2. To set a default value, use the syntax :default_value. For example, [[city:nashville]] – if a contact’s city field is empty, “nashville” will be used as the placeholder text.
  3. The information that is used to create the link is pulled in at the time of click, not the time of send. Because of this, if the information in the member record changes, the link will change along with it, since it’s not printing the information into the email, but rather linking back to your account to get the information at the time of click.
  4. If you’re using personalization to create the entire URL, not just a portion of it, then the link in your contact field CANNOT contain http:// or https://. Our system will add that automatically, so if the link in your contact field includes http:// or https://, it will break the link.

How to create a PURL

  1. Navigate to your Audience tab.
  2. Click on the Contact fields section in the panel on the left.
  3. Click on the Create contact field button on the right and follow the steps to create the field that will hold the unique part of the URL. For more information about creating contact fields, please refer to this article. If you plan to use an existing field, you can skip this step.
  4. Click on the name of the field to see its shortcut name. You’ll need this for later, so be sure to write it down or remember it.
  5. Import the unique URL value to each contact’s record. Be sure to choose Add & update as your import type.
  6. To create the PURL, you’ll format the field’s shortcut name with double brackets like this: [[shortcut_name]]. For this example, if the shortcut name is coupon-code, the tag should be formatted like this: [[coupon-code]]. This code is replaced with the unique value for each recipient and can be added onto the static part of the URL, like this: www.example.com/[[coupon-code]].
  7. Once you have the PURL built, you can insert it as a link just like you’d link to a normal website.

How to use an email address in a PURL

If you’d like to use an email address within a PURL, just use this personalization tag: [[email]]

For example, if your URL uses a recipient’s email address as the unique part of the URL, like this: www.example.com/email_address/special, then the PURL for the example would be: www.example.com/[[email]]/special.

* In April 2022, our legacy editor was replaced with a new drag and drop editor. Accounts that existed prior to this change still have access to the legacy editor through their previously saved templates and campaigns, however new, from-scratch campaigns can only be created in the new drag and drop editor. Accounts that were created after this change only have access to the new drag and drop editor. Please refer to our new editor FAQ article for more information.