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How to use merge tags in your email campaigns
How to use merge tags in your email campaigns

In this article, you'll learn about merge tags and the ways in which you can use them to personalise your email campaigns.

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Written by Anthony Green
Updated over a year ago

When you build emails in Airship, you can automatically merge details into them to personalise them. For example, a customer’s first name. These are called merge tags. Airship offers merge tags for all kinds of dynamic information. 

Terminology

Account merge tags

This encompasses tags such as your account name or location specific data about your Airship account.

Contact merge tags

This encompasses tags such as a contact’s name or email address. Merge these into your email campaigns to personalise the emails sent to your database.

Unit merge tags

This includes tags such as a Unit’s name or address. Merge these into your email campaigns if you need to automatically merge details of one of your locations.

Content merge tags

If you have custom merged content configured on your account, these tags can be merged into your emails.

User Defined Fields merge tags

If you have User Defined Fields configured on your account, you can merge any data stored in those fields to your emails.

How to insert a merge tag into your email subject

Choose a Tag from the ‘Intelligent salutation’ dropdown to insert a merge tag into your Subject line. For example, you may want to add a ‘First Name’ to a subject line.

Below is an example of a subject line with the First Name merge tag used:

How to insert a merge tag into your email body

Click to edit a text frame to edit the text content. If you want to add a merge tag, choose a tag from the “Intelligent salutation” dropdown and then click “Insert Tag”.

Set default merge tag values

Bear in mind that if you are using merge tags as part of the content of your email, there are probably contacts on your database where merged content will not be available, for example, if the contact decided not to provide their first name. 

Where content is not available for a merge tag, you can set a fallback so that content does not appear empty. You'll be prompted to set default content as you proceed to send your email.

Testing 

We recommend that you always test merge tags by sending a test email before sending a campaign email to your database.

Merge tags do not preview if you click “Preview” while building your email. Instead, carry out a test send to your email address to check your email before sending the campaign email to your database.

Troubleshooting

If merge tags do not display correctly, there may be an error in the formatting of the merge tag if it has been typed manually.

  • Make sure your merge tag name is surrounded by colon characters (:)

  • Merge tags are case sensitive, ensure they are typed in all lowercase, e.g. :cnt_firstname:, not :CNT_FIRSTNAME:

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