Mass communications shouldn't look like mass communications. Your recipients are real people with real personalities, so when it comes to sending emails in bulk, it behooves you to add a human touch to them – at the very least, to address people by name. 💗 Moreover, you'll inevitably bump into other situations when you'll have to insert data that's different for everyone, such as an application URL, a passport number, or something else.
Enter merge tags, the answer to reaching a large audience without compromising personalization! 😎
What's an email merge tag and where can I add them?
A merge tag is essentially a code that stands for a specific but variable piece of information, such as a surname, the name of a programme or a phone number, just to mention a few examples. It's meant to be replaced with the individual data of every recipient, like so:
The way merge tags work is that, whenever you wish to send a personalized mass e-mail, the codes must be added to where in the text you want the corresponding data to go; then, upon dispatch, the tags are automatically replaced with the personal details of each person within the audience segment. Accordingly, the resulting emails look like they were specially written for each particular addressee, despite having been blasted to potentially hundreds of people. 💗 Here's an example:
It's possible to use merge tags in any email – more concretely, one-to-one emails, campaigns, or automation-related email templates (like the event registration confirmation email, for instance).
Email merge tags should not be confused with letter merge tags. The latter were conceived to work with Microsoft Word's Merge Field feature, therefore the codes are mutually incompatible. 🚫
How do I add a merge tag to an email message?
Adding a merge tag to an email message is as easy as can be:
1) Create a new email or access a draft in progress
2) Find the Merge tags button the the email builder's toolbar:
3) Compose the message and, every time you need to add a merge tag to it, place the text cursor where you want to insert the tag.
4) Finally, click on the required merge tag to add it
There you go! 😁
For more information on how to create an email message in Full Fabric, please read this other Help Center article: How to design a unique email message from scratch.
What data can be retrieved through an email merge tag?
The email merge tags are divided by major product contexts: Application, Event, Form and Event (product choices), Profile, Lifecycle Workflow, Staff Emails, Evaluation, Payment Plan
Find below each and every mergetag available for each context:
Important notes to consider
Profile data is always retrievable, regardless of where in Full Fabric you build an email message. But please note that it pulls data from the recipient's profile. If the recipient is an applicant, it'll be data from their profile – but, by the same token, if the recipient happens to be a staff user (such as to send an application submission notification), then it'll be their data. Hence the existence of the second and third categories.
Merge tags related to applications only work if they're affiliated with a candidate, meaning that they need to be linked to an applicant profile and to an actual application in order to have information to pull. Consequently:
If you're building a shared email template, you'll have to associate the template with an application template, which in turn must be associated with a class. The same applies to test emails: instead of using the Send me a test email feature, follow the aforementioned steps and then submit an application using a test profile that's been added to the relevant class.
Alternatively, if you're building an applicant notification template, you may build it directly from scratch in the respective application template by navigating to Automation and then Applicant notification template, and selecting Build a new email template.
For event merge tags, they also need to be linked to a specific event. In other words:
If you're building a shared email template, you'll have to associate it with a specific event.
If you're building a registration confirmation email, you can build it directly from scratch in the Message tab of an event.
If you're building a reminder email, you can build it directly from scratch in the Reminders tab of an event.
Otherwise, as with application merge tags, the event merge tags will be merely replaced with blank spaces.
The purpose of each email merge tag is rather straightforward and plainly stated in its name, with perhaps the exception of the tag QR Code, which generates a unique QR code for every event registration confirmation email and complementary event reminders in order to automatically mark event attendance. To learn more about this topic, we recommend the following article: Use QR codes to automatically mark event attendance.
If you fail to meet the above criteria, the merge tags will simply produce blank spaces:
To wrap it up, basically the mergetag can only pull data firstly if there is data available to pull (if it exists to be pulled), and if that email is being generated under the correct context.