Personalise an Email With Wildcards (Mail Merge Fields)

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Our system lets you add wildcards (also known as mail merge fields) to your messages, so that you can personalise them. One common example is the First Name field, to introduce your email. Any field in your list can be inserted as a wildcard - and they can even include images or basic HTML code!

Our wildcards also feature a "fallback" option, which is displayed when the field for a particular contact is empty. That way, you can still have your email say "Dear valued client" (instead of just "Dear "), if a recipient has a blank first name field.

How-to Guide

This article contains a number of guides for various related topics. Click below to jump ahead to a particular guide.

• Insert a Wildcard in an Email
• Personalise Your Subject Line With Wildcards
• Insert an Image Wildcard
• Insert a URL / Link Wildcard
• Testing Wildcards

Inserting a Wildcard in an Email

1. Select Messages from the sidebar.
2. Double-click on your email to open it for editing.
3. Place your cursor where you would like the wildcard to be inserted.
4. Click on Wildcard dropdown from the floating toolbar, and choose the list and list field that you would like to insert as a wildcard.
   
5. Optionally enter a Fallback word or phrase. This will appear for recipients if they do not have any data in the selected wildcard field.
6. Once the wildcard has been inserted in your message, it will appear as a code with %% in front and behind the field name, and underscores (_) replacing any spaces that may have been in your field name (e.g. %%First_Name%%, as shown below).
   

Personalise Your Subject Line With Wildcards

You can also personalise your subject line with your contact fields using wildcards. For example, you might like to include the persons first name in the subject. Here's how:

1. Select Messages from the sidebar.
2. Double-click on your email to open it for editing.
3. From the Actions menu, choose Message Details.
4. In the Email Subject field, place your cursor where you would like to insert the personalisation.
5. Click the + icon to the right of the subject field.
6. Select the folder that contains your list, then choose the actual list. 
7. Now select the relevant field you'd like to insert into the subject line as a wildcard.
8. If you'd like to fallback to a different word or phrase if the field is blank for any of your recipients, enter the desired Fallback text.
9. Click Insert.
   
10. You should now have a wildcard in your subject line. You can still alter the text around the wildcard if you wish.
    
11. Click Save changes to finalise your changes.

Insert an Image Wildcard

Generally speaking, if you have a requirement for dynamic images in your email message, our Conditional Content feature would be a quicker & easier process. However if you require more flexibility, you can also insert a wildcarded image into your message by tweaking the HTML code - as outlined here in this guide.

1. On your computer, create or locate your various images to be used as the wildcards. In our example, we'll be using photos of our sales team - to help the reader identify their particular sales representative.
2. Save these images somewhere on your computer using easily-identifiable file names, such as the salesperson's name.
   
3. In our platform, select Files and Images from the sidebar. The Files & Images Manager will now open.
4. Optionally create a new folder for storing these images, then upload your images.
5. Now we need to grab the URL for each image you just uploaded. Hover over the image in question and click ⋮.
6. Select Copy URL from the menu, then paste the resulting URL somewhere - such as a Notepad document or similar. Repeat this process for all images until you have all of their URLs handy.
7. When done, close the Files & Images Manager.
8. Now that you have the URLs for all of your sales rep images, you'll need to assign these to each of your contacts.
   For example, if all of your Queensland contacts are managed by Renee and all of your South Australian contacts are managed by Joseph, you'll need to enter the relevant salesperson's image URL against a new field for each of your contacts. That way, whenever a contact in Queensland gets an email from you, Renee's image will appear in the email. You can either do this in our platform, or in a spreadsheet which you can then re-upload into our platform when ready. We'll assume you're doing it in our platform, so follow these steps to add a new field on your list. Be sure to make it a Comment field type.
9. Use spreadsheet view to paste the relevant sales representative's image URL next to each contact, as shown. In our case, we've named our new field 'Sales Rep Photo'.
   
10. Finally, let's edit our email message to insert a wildcarded image to display that contact's sales rep photo in the email. Select Messages from the sidebar.
11. Double-click on your email to open it for editing.
12. Inside of a text area (either a Text or Paragraph component), place your mouse where you wish to insert the wildcarded image.
13. Click the Image icon on the floating toolbar.
14. Select one of the images in the folder you created for this purpose.
15. Click the HTML icon on the floating toolbar.
16. In the code, find the URL for the image you just inserted.
    
17. Replace the source with the wildcard that links to the field that contains the URLs for the images. In the case of our example, we placed all of the image URLs into a field called 'Sales Rep Photo', so the wildcard for this field would be '%%Sales_Rep_Photo%%', as shown.
    Just like text wildcards can have fallback text (used if the wildcarded field is blank), image wildcards can have a fallback image, too! To configure a fallback image, go into HTML view (as per Step 15, above) and alter the source code of your wildcard from (in the case of our example) %%Sales_Rep_Photo%% to %%Sales_Rep_Photo**https://your-website-here/path/to/image/somepicture.jpg%%
18. Click Update and the image will appear broken in your message. This is ok, because wildcards don't render until the email is previewed or sent.
    
19. Save your message.
20. Then test this by Previewing the message against the list that contains the URL images. Then simply flick through the contacts using the arrows and you will notice the image is now displaying correctly and changing based on the image that is assigned to the contact record.
    

Insert a URL / Link Wildcard

This type of wildcard would be used if you need to link to a unique website, file or document for each contact receiving your message. Here's how:

1. Follow these steps to add a new field on your list. Be sure to make it a Comment field type (these field types can hold a lot of data). Give the field an easily-identifiable name (for example, 'URL'). 
2. Next, populate this field for each of your contacts. You can either do this in our platform, or in a spreadsheet which you can then re-upload into our platform when ready. We'll assume you're doing it in our platform, so you can use spreadsheet view to enter or paste-in the relevant URLs into your newly-created field from Step 1.
3. Now we'll edit our email message to insert a wildcarded URL. Select Messages from the sidebar.
4. Double-click on your email to open it for editing.
5. Insert a link into your email.
6. In the link dialog, enter the wildcard for your field. A wildcard has two percentage signs before, and two after, your field name. So if your field name was 'URL' (as per our example), then you would enter %%URL%%
   
   
7. Click Insert Link. You have now added a wildcarded link to your email message.

Testing Wildcards

1. Preview the message you are creating.
   
2. Select the list you would be sending this to up the top left.
   
3. Flick through the contacts with the arrows and you will noticed that the wildcards will change depending on the contact record - if it does, then everything is working correctly.
   

Wildcard Identifiers

As you can see from the many examples above, we indicate the start and end of a wildcard with two percentage symbols (%%). However, the system will also accept the legacy wildcard identifier at the start and end of a wildcard, which is two hash symbols (##).

Because of this, it's important to ensure any uploaded HTML code doesn't contain two hash symbols - such as an accidental double hash at the start of a HEX colour code (eg. ##cc0000 for red, instead of the correct format, #cc0000).

Wildcards for Automations

If you're using an Advanced Automation to send a message with wildcards & your message is going to someone other than the contact that data relates to, you'll need to adjust your wildcard slightly. One such example of this is sending an internal notification as part of an automation.

Instead of using wildcards as per normal (eg. %%First_Name%%) within the message, Advanced Automation wildcards would need to be used (eg. these wildcards allow the notification to be populated with the contacts details, and not those of the person being sent the notification).

To specify a Advanced Automation wildcard, simply append the "campaign_" syntax to the wildcard, for example:

• %%First_Name%% would then become %%campaign_First_Name%%
• %%Address%% would then become %%campaign_Address%%

Further Reading

Looking for more advanced wildcards? Our Advanced Conditional Wildcards support logic flags such as HAS, HASNOT, CONTAINS, NOTCONTAINS, IF/ELSE and so on.

Advanced Conditional Wildcard