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Adding Merge Fields (personalization)

In Outbound E-mail, you can personalize an e-mail message to an individual Contact by adding to it the Contact’s surname or telephone number in the text of the e-mail. You personalize individual fields using Merge Fields.

A Merge Field is a piece of text that represents a specific Contact Detail, such as a telephone number or the organization to which the Contact belongs.

You can enter Merge Fields wherever text may appear, but in most cases you will use Merge Fields in the following places:

  • In the E-mail Subject, From, and E-mail Sender Address fields of a Mailing
  • In a Component field
  • In Component Templates or Page Templates

To insert a Merge Field, you wrap the name of a Contact Detail in angled brackets and asterisks as follows:

[* ContactDetail *]

where ContactDetail is the name of a Contact Extended Detail field. For example, if your Contact's extended details consists of the fields described in the table below, you can insert the following Merge Fields in a Mailing to create a Mailing personalized to each individual who receives the Mailing:

[* Salutation *][* Prefix *][* Surname *]

The result would be, for example, personalized text inserted in the e-mail such as "Dear Mr Moody" or "Dear Mrs Popova".

The following are examples of Contact Extended Details fields, although note that these are configurable at a database level and therefore vary depending on the implementation of Outbound E-mail:

Contact Extended Detail NameDescription
Salutation

A phrase preceding the name in a letter heading, for example "Dear"

Prefix

The title of a person, such as "Ms", "Dr" or "Mr"

Name

The Contact’s first name, such as "Penelope" or "Federico"

Surname

The Contact’s surname, such as "Horowitz" or "Smithers"

Company

The organization to which the Contact belongs.

You can also use the EmailAddress constant in a Merge Field to add the Contact’s e-mail address.