Contact data placeholders

You can add placeholders in your communication content and in link URL's to personalize the content per recipient and to adjust the landing page with the data tied to each and every recipient. In Symplify, this is managed by something called handlebars.

The most common personalization probably is to greet your contacts by their name, said with Symplify handlebars, this is what it looks like:

{{contact.firstName}}

So, this handlebar will grab the “firstname” data from each recipient and place it in the sendout where you have added the handlebar.

You don't have to create your handlebars, when a recipient attribute is created on your account, a handlebar connected to that attribute is immediately ready for use.


How to use handlebars

When you’re editing your content you can find all your available handlebars in the inspector by clicking the A icon in the top right. You can then copy or click the magic wand to add the handlebar to your content.

​Handlebars is an open and “free” technique that in it self offers great many coding possibilities and therefore appeal to your own skills (learn more about it this article).

​So, for example, when using a handlebar like;

{{contact.signUpDate}}

which probably would render a date like this:
2019-01-10
you also have the possibilities to format it more, if you know how to code it, such as:

{{date ‘DD-MM-YY’ contact.signUpDate}}

this will now rearrange the date format and instead render:
10-01-19

This is only one of many examples of what you can do with the technique of course. If you're ready to dig deeper, go to the handlebar rundown to learn more about how you can use and transform your data.

Pack your handlebars in Snippets

You may have figured out by now that using more complex handlebars in your content could cause a lot of code. This in turn may make it harder to get your head around how the actual design and content will render, when the handlebars and all its code have done its job, so to speak...

To ease up on those effects you can use Snippets to store all the handlebar code in, and just add the snippet into the actual content instead.

Find out more about that Snippet-thingy.


Attribute values in Message history

Please note that placeholder data is not technically saved (in the Symplify database) on the message sent to your contact. Message history is fetching the current value to present content. This means that a message sent with one attribute value might look different in message history when looking at it some time later when the value has been updated (this doesn't affect the actual sent message). 

For storing the full message, please learn about Message Cloud.

Was this article helpful?
0 out of 0 found this helpful