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Personalization in Channels
Personalization in Channels

Learn how to add names and other data about subscribers to your campaigns and automation

Paulius avatar
Written by Paulius
Updated over a week ago

Omnisend has many features that help you personalize the messages sent to your readers. They can include any data describing the recipient (first and last names, gender, address, etc.) or provide some insights about the order, for example, its billing and shipping information.

In this article, you will learn how to add different data about your customers to your email and SMS content.

Contents

Before you start

You can use personalized data for communication in both Campaigns and Automation workflows. However, in contrast to Campaigns, Automations triggered by a specific event can carry information about that event (abandoned cart link in the Abandoned Cart flow or tracking link in the Shipping Confirmation one).

Suppose you set the trigger in the Automation workflow to the Custom Event passed by a 3rd party application. In that case, the personalization menu will provide an additional category with the list of the custom fields that the event is carrying.

You can add the information about your contacts to all channels:

  • Email

  • SMS

  • Push Notifications

How does it work?

Personalized variables can be added as regular text or as a personalized link in various fields, as long as you have a tag option to insert them.

The information can be added to the following pieces of data:

  • Email message subject line;

  • Content of the message;

  • Content Blocks in the Email message.

Once you select the personalization category and the value, Omnisend will automatically place that information in the message you want to send. Just make sure it is available to Omnisend; otherwise, the system will leave it blank, for example:

Hello [[contact.first_name]]!

If the subscriber's name is in our database, the output will be: Hello John!

If the subscriber's name is unknown, the result will be: Hello!

You can also define a specific text (AKA fallback text) that will work as an alternative for an empty value if, for example, your subscriber's name is unknown:

Hello [[contact.first_name|default:'there']]! 

If the subscriber's name is in our database, the output will be: Hello John!

If the subscriber's name is unknown, the result will be: Hello there!

Conditional personalization

You can also add a different text based on each of the values of personalization variables. For example, you can show additional text depending on the country field value:

[% if contact.country == "France" %] Bonjour! [% else %] Hello! [% endif %]

If the subscriber's country in our database is France, the output will be: Bonjour!

If the subscriber's country is different, the output will be: Hello!

πŸ’¬ If you have used personalization in the email channel before, the old syntax {{name}} will keep working, but new emails will be created using the new syntax [[contact.name]].

Note! Conditional personalization works in Automations only.

Personalization in the Email message Content blocks

Personalization can be added to different parts of a single Content block, including the Title, Text, Links, Buttons, etc.

Please note that not all the content blocks let you add the personalization variable in Classic builder:

  • Gift Box;

  • Scratch card;

  • Customer feedback.

To address this problem, you can combine the Text + Gift Box Content blocks, etc.

πŸ’‘ Some event-based Content blocks may have a personalized variable as an inherent property. In such cases, you won't find the personalization tag. For example, the Checkout button in the Abandoned Cart sequence has the abandoned cart link preset. The personalization tag shown in the screenshot would add the link to the button's name.

Personalization variables

In the Personalization menu, you will see different categories of personalization variables, including:

  • Contact;

  • Account;

  • Date;

  • Event (for event-based Automations only).

Contact variables

The list of the default properties includes the general information taken from your contacts' profiles and custom properties.

[[contact.email]] 
[[contact.first_name]]
[[contact.last_name]]
[[contact.city]]
[[contact.country]]
[[contact.state]]
[[contact.phone_number]]
[[contact.postal_code]]
[[unsubscribe_link]]
[[preference_link]]
[[contact.custom_properties.name_of_custom_property]]

If you collect some custom subscribers' information, such as clothing size or loyalty points, you can add it to the content of the message by clicking on the Personalization tag β†’ Contact β†’ Custom properties.

Custom information about your contacts can be collected with Signup forms, Subscriber Preference page, assigned manually, or by an integrated third-party app.

Account variables

Among the Account variables, you can find the information about your store that you might want to add to the message.

[[account.name]] 
[[account.address]]
[[account.city]]
[[account.zipCode]]
[[account.country]]
[[account.timezone]]
[[account.currency]]
[[account.website]]

Date variables

Here, you can find the information about the email's date. Since your Automated messages can be triggered on different dates and at other times, the time and date when the email was sent will be added to the message content.

Current day              [[current_date|date:'%d']] 
Current day name [[current_date|date:'%A']]
Current month [[current_date|date:'%m']]
Current month name [[current_date|date:'%B']]
Current year [[current_date|date:'%Y']]

Event variables

Unlike other variables, you can add event variables to the Automated workflows only. The list of variables will also depend on the type of event in the trigger settings. In general, those might be categorized as follows:

  • Order variables for the order placed & Order status change triggers;

  • Abandoned Cart URL variable for Abandoned cart trigger;

  • Custom variables for Custom event trigger.

πŸ’¬ Learn more about Custom events and custom fields in the corresponding article.

Troubleshooting

If personalization does not transform in sent emails - try deleting it fully and rewriting it or re-selecting it. If personalization is edited only in-part, it may lose integrity and stop working.

Have more questions? Feel free to contact our Support Team via in-app chat or at [email protected].

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