| This guide references Campaign Designer and Classic Editor, legacy features which might not be available in your account. |
This guide has been put together specifically for coding templates for use in the Campaign Designer and Classic Editor modes. We have a separate guide for adding personalisation to the campaigns themselves, which can be found by clicking here.
There are three types of personalisation which this document will cover:
Personalised text
What it is
Personalised text is a way of adding specific information about your subscriber to an email campaign, for example starting an email by addressing the recipient by their first name. Personalisation creates a personal and friendly feel to your emails, encouraging subscribers to read and engage with your campaigns.
How it works
When an email is sent any personalisation within the saved campaign is compared to your subscriber database and the relevant data is added in its place. If the data doesn't exist then alternate text, which you can provide, is displayed instead. For example, if you decide to use 'Customer' as your alternate text for the first name, any subscribers without a first name saved will see 'Dear Customer' in their email.
Personalisation that can be included
Additionally you can also include any subscriber profiles (custom data fields) which have been previously set up within your account.
How to insert personalisation into your template
To add personalisation to your template, simply include one of the above personalisations or a custom data field in curly brackets in the following form:
{sut-first_name:Customer}
The word after the colon is the alternate text, in this example 'Customer'. You don't have to have alternate text, but if you don't, anyone without the corresponding data will see a blank space. If you don't want to use alternate text, just remove the word after the colon (but make sure not to remove the colon itself).
Personalised links
What they are
Personalisation can be added to your link URL allowing for the creation of personalised links. This is useful if you want to pass information from your subscriber data to your site.
How they work
As with personalised text, when an email is sent, any personalisation within the saved campaign is compared to your subscriber database and the relevant data is added in its place. In the case of subscriber data being unavailable, nothing will be inserted into the link.
Personalisation that can be included
How to insert personalised links into your template
Adding personalisation to links within your email template is easy. The following details the steps you need to take in order to add link personalisation.
In this example, we will add first name personalisation to the following URL which will perform a Google search of the subscriber's first name:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=
In your URL you will need to add the correct personalisation value, as detailed in the table above. For this example we will add the first name to the link, displayed as %sut_first_name%.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%sut_first_name%
Next, we insert this URL into the href attribute of our a tag:
<a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%sut_first_name%" name=" "> text </a>
If you were to send the above code to a subscriber called John, the following link would be generated:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=John
The 'name' attribute of the personalised link is optional. If the 'name' attribute is specified, the above link will be tracked by Sign-Up.to's link tracking system. If omitted from the tag, the link will not be tracked. If more than one personalised link is in the campaign and they need to be tracked, the 'name' element should be unique as these will be displayed in the Analyse section for this campaign. Any links carrying the same value in the 'name' attribute will be tracked as one item.
Please note: that only the following characters can be used for the tracking name. Other characters will be removed when sending.
Campaign Links
What they are
In addition to the above personalisation fields, campaign links can also be inserted into the email template. These links allow your subscribers to perform special actions such as sending your email to their friends or viewing your email in their browser.
How they work
Campaign links are links to actions within the Sign-Up.to system. When a user clicks a campaign link the appropriate action is taken. For example, if a subscriber clicks to unsubscribe, their email address is removed from your database.
Personalisation that can be included
How to insert campaign links into your template
The above personalisation values can be inserted as the 'href' attribute in the a tag as follows:
<a href="%sut_unsubscribe%"> text </a>