Engage your audience and increase your impact by making emails more direct and personal.
With name personalization for the Email Designer, you can automatically greet each of your recipients by name in the body text of your emails.

In This Article

• Personalization Options
• Prerequisites
• Personalizing an Email Designer Draft
• Previewing Your Personalized Email While Editing the Draft
• Checking Personalization Settings Before You Send
• Fixing Name Fields Before You Send
• Additional Helpful Information

Personalization Options

Personalization in Employee Email works similarly to Mail Merge functionality in the Microsoft Office suite by using merge tags, for example, “hey {{firstName}},” that reference the following fields in your Employee Email contact directory:

• First Name
• Last Name

You can also set up custom fallback text such as “everyone” to replace an empty first name or last name field.

When you send the email, it will greet recipients differently depending on which of their contact fields you’re using and which fields are filled in or blank, for example:

“Hey {{firstName}} {{lastName}},” (no fallback text configured)

• “Hey John Doe,” if their first name and last name fields are both filled in.
• “Hey John,” if their last name field is blank.
• “Hey Doe,” if their first name field is blank.
• “Hey,” if their first name and last name fields are both blank.

“Hey {{firstName}},”

• “Hey everyone,” if their first name field is blank and you configured the fallback text “everyone”.
• “Hey,” if their first name field is blank and no fallback text is configured.

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Prerequisites

• Your organization sends emails via the Employee Email web app or Studio integration.
• The names of your intended recipients in the Email contact directory are filled in and formatted correctly to display in your email.
  Optionally, you can fix these fields in the contact directory before sending a personalized email.

Personalizing an Email Designer Draft

1. While editing a draft or template in the Employee Email web app or Studio integration, click into a text element.
2. In the text editing toolbar, click the Personalize button.
   
   
3. Click the {{firstName}} and/or {{lastName}} tags to add them to the text element.
   If any recipients have a blank first name field and/or last name field in the contact directory and no fallback text is configured to replace it, the email will be sent to them without the missing value(s) or any spaces that you added before or after the tags.
   For example, "Hey {{firstName}}," is sent as "Hey," and not "Hey," if their first name field is blank.
4. In the Tag Fallbacks menu, check if there is already a default value set for your organization in the text boxes for any tags you are using.
   
   
   
   
   Note: Adding or changing the fallback text for a tag will update the tag's fallback for every email draft in your organization, including scheduled emails.
5. Optionally, click the edit button for a specific tag to delete a default fallback value for your organization or add a new one.
   For example, if you enter “everyone” as the fallback for the {{firstName}} tag, then “Hey {{firstName}},” will be sent as “Hey everyone,” to any recipients whose first name field is blank.
6. Click Apply to save your fallback text.
   

   Warning: If you use {{firstName}} and {{lastName}} tags together, ensure that your fallbacks make sense in various combinations so that none of your sent emails display odd-looking greetings like these:

   • “Hey John everyone,”
   • “Hey everyone Doe,”

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Previewing Your Personalized Email

1. While editing a draft or template that includes tags for personalization in the Employee Email web app or Studio integration, click the Preview tab.
2. In the Preview Info menu, open the Personalization dropdown.
   
   
   
   
   • Select Fallback text to replace your tags with the values that you have set to display in case a field is blank for some recipients in your Email contact directory.
   • Select Sample data to replace your tags with sample first name and/or last name values.

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Checking Personalization Settings Before You Send

1. While preparing to send or schedule a personalized email draft from the Employee Email web app or Studio integration, click Review Email.
   
   
2. On the Review email page, a Personalized Text section displays the following:
   
   
   • All tags that are included in the email draft
   • Any fallback text that has been set in case the contact directory fields referenced by these tags are blank
   • A count of any recipients that are missing data (blank fields in the contact directory)
3. To check which recipients are missing data, click View details.
   Optionally, copy these recipients' email addresses and fix their missing data before sending.
4. When you are satisfied with the personalization settings, click either Send Now or Save Schedule, depending on whether you have scheduled your email to send later.

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Fixing Name Fields Before You Send

When you send an email that includes name tags, the recipient names from your Email contact directory will be inserted directly into your emails with no validation or automated changes to the original capitalization, spacing, dashes, and so on.
Sometimes, the first or last name field may be blank.

To ensure all recipients receive a personalized email and are addressed correctly, you can update these fields in the contact directory before sending a personalized email.

The quickest fix is to upload a CSV file with corrected entries for the contacts that have missing or oddly formatted names.

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Additional Helpful Information

• Overview of Personalizing Employee Emails
• Personalizing Employee Emails with Custom Attributes
• Editing an Email Designer draft or template
• Sending or scheduling an email
• Uploading Email contact data via a comma-separated values (CSV) file