Placing Field Tags in your messages is a great way to use existing contact data to create more personalized messages. However, sometimes you don’t have certain data for contacts in your account. Without this data, the tags will be replaced with no content. Obviously, this can create problems and be a blemish on an otherwise flawless email.

Tell Me More

Let’s start off with an example. Let’s say at the top of your message you have the following salutation:

Dear %%firstname%%,

When the message is sent, %%firstname%% will get replaced with the value stored for the contact in the firstname field. However, if there is no value in the firstname field for the contact, the salutation will read “Dear ,”. Not only does this look bad, but it ruins the personalized feel of the message and leads your contacts to believe that grammar was a sour point for you in school!

Dynamic Content To The Rescue!

To prevent this little mishap from occurring, you can make use of Dynamic Content. We could remedy the issue in the example above by doing the following:

1. Click Insert Dynamic Content on the WYSIYG editor toolbar.
2. Select the options shown in the screen shot below from the Edit Dynamic Content window.
3. Click Insert Raw Dynamic Code or Insert Re-Editable Dynamic Content.

Basically this works by checking to see if the firstname field is blank. If it is, then the text “Valued Customer” is used. If the firstname field for the contact has a value, then the value is used. For those of you familiar with Dynamic Code, the complete code for the salutation would look something like this:

Dear {dynamic_code}{if $Contact.firstname eq ""}{literal}Valued Customer{/literal}{else}{literal}%%firstname%%{/literal}{/if}{/dynamic_code}

A contact with no value in the firstname field would see “Dear Valued Customer”, whereas a contact with a value in their firstname field would see “Dear John Doe” (where John Doe is the value in the firstname field for the contact).

So now you have an easy way to handle instances when there is no data in Field Tags you use in your messages. Feel free to leave any questions or comments in the comments section below.

John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto
Editor of Brontoversity

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Earlier this year, Frank Chapman gave us a great post on how to use personalization in your messages, Getting Personal With Your Contacts. If you’re wondering how to get started using personalization, check out his article for a quick how-to guide.

If you’re already personalizing your emails, though, you may be missing out on a key feature: personalization testing. You probably already know that Bronto’s Send Test feature provides a quick view of message formatting and layout in your inbox. But with one simple step, you can also test your message personalization fields to ensure they’re working properly.

Once you’ve composed your message and are ready to test it out, click the Send Test button.

On the next page, set your sending options and recipients. Then, check the box marked “Use a random contact for personalization” shown below. Choosing this will pull the field value from a random contact and use it within your test message.

Only the field value from the random contact will be pulled – they will not be sent the message. Only the person(s) you specify in the sending options will receive the message.

Once you’ve checked this box, proceed with verifying and sending your test message. When you receive the message, you’ll see your personalization tag replaced with a value pulled from a random contact!

As always, if you have any questions about personalizing messages, feel free to post in the comments or to open a case from the Support link within your account.

Brad Gurley
Support Associate at Bronto

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How Does It Work

Any link within a message may include a field tag. A common example is a userid or email address appended as a parameter to a link:

http ://mysite.com/foo/bar?sale=3322fe&custId=%%custid%%
NOTE: For this example, imagine custid is a field you maintain for your contacts.

Links created in this manner are tracked properly, with results showing normally in the click-through tracking report. Because the personalization takes place in the last step in the process (when we actually redirect the URL), the click-through tracking report actually shows the link with personalization tags still in tag format (%%custid%%).

Warning About URLs Entirely Composed Of Field Tags

Currently, we cannot track links that are entirely populated by a tag:

href='%%link%%'

The reason we cannot track this type of URL is that there is no root URL for us to latch onto. In these cases, the link is still inserted into the message, but it is not encoded with a tracking link. Because of this, we have no indication that the link was ever clicked. So if you need or want click-through tracking for this URL, you should not construct the URL entirely using field tags.

Take A Look For Yourself

The screenshot below demonstrates how the application handles click-through tracking for URLs built using field tags. The text in yellow explains each URL and why it was or was not tracked (Click on the image to enlarge it).

Field tags can be a very useful tool, especially if you are using them to complete URLs for your messages. Remember to be mindful of the effects field tags have on click-through tracking and you will be able to create the kinds of messages that get the results you want!

John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto
Editor of Brontoversity

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A Greeting For Each Of Your Contacts

Adding a personalized greeting using a contact’s first name in Bronto is an easy way to add a little more impact to any campaign.  To add a contact’s first name to an email, all you need is the contact’s name and a little know-how concerning field tags.

In this example we will be adding the contact’s first name in a salutation.  You will need to have a field in Bronto that is storing your contacts’ first names.  It is important to note that the name for a field needs to be in all lower case with no spaces.  In the case of the illustration below, the name of this field is “firstname”.

Now, to add the field to your message, you will add this code %%firstname%% where you would like to see the name appear.

The application will see this tag and add the name as the message is sent.  The resulting message salutation will look like this:

What If I Do Not Have Everybody’s Name?

It’s okay, Bronto can help with that as well.  You will need to decide how you would like to refer to your contacts that you do not have first name information for.  As an example, we will call our nameless contacts “Valued Customer”.

The tag that you would need to us is %%if(%%firstname%% is empty,"Valued Customer",%%firstname%%)%%.  This tag should look like the one in the image below when you preview your message.

This “if statement” is letting the Bronto application know that you would like to use the first name for the contact, unless you have no data available in the field for that contact.  If there is no data, the application will substitute the statement inside the quotation marks.

A Few Things To Remember About Field Tags In Bronto

• You must have a field in your account that corresponds to the field tag you wish to use (i.e. the “firstname” field that corresponds with the %%firstname%% field tag).
• You must refer to the field exactly by name. Spelling counts and the tag is case sensitive.
• Field tags aren’t just for just salutations.  You can use field tags and the data that goes along with them for many other marketing purposes. Some examples of this would be, recent product purchases, important dates, or a dynamic link to a contacts personal landing page.

With a creative mind and a good knowledge of how field tags work in Bronto, you now have a tool with limitless marketing possibilities.  Please use this tool wisely and remember to always test and then test again.

Frank Chapman
Client Support Specialist at Bronto

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