Placeholders let you personalize the content of a message for each contact, for example by greeting them by name. You can use them in the message content and in link URLs, for example to send contact data to a landing page. In Symplify, placeholders are written in handlebars.
The most common placeholder greets the contact by first name:
{{contact.firstName}}
When the message is sent, the placeholder is replaced with the value in the contact's firstName attribute.
You don't need to create placeholders yourself. As soon as a contact attribute exists on your account, its placeholder is ready to use.
Add a placeholder to your content
When you edit your content, click Attribute tags in the editor toolbar. The panel lists all available placeholders. Click one to insert it into the text, or copy it and paste it where you want it.
Transform the value
Handlebars can also change how a value is shown. For example, this placeholder:
{{contact.signUpDate}}
renders the date as it is stored, for example 2024-03-15. To show it in another format, add a date pattern:
{{date 'dd-MM-yy' contact.signUpDate}}
This renders 15-03-24.
Formatting dates is only one example. To learn more about formatting, fallbacks and conditions, see the Handlebars rundown.
Keep long handlebars in snippets
Advanced handlebars can add a lot of code to your content, which makes it harder to see what the message will look like. Store the code in a snippet instead, and add the snippet to your content. See Snippets.
Attribute values in message history
Symplify doesn't save the placeholder values with each sent message. When you open a message in the message history, the current attribute values are shown. If a value has changed since the message was sent, the message in the history looks different from the one the contact received. The sent message itself isn't affected.
To store the full message as it was sent, see Message Cloud.