Getting the most out of Merge Tags
A personalised email can really help your message stand out. Sending an email directly to a named teacher or including their organisation name or location will draw their eye and demonstrate you’ve taken the time to learn a little about them. However, get it wrong and use incorrect merge tags and your cover is blown.
Before inserting merge tags into your subject line and body text, we always recommend you read our ‘ how to use merge tags’ article and follow the guidelines in place.
It’s important to remember that merge tags differ depending on the recipients of your email - whether you are sending your campaign to Contacts in your CRM or Schools/Teachers in the Education Data Module.
Here’s an email that uses personalisation correctly. Notice how the email talks directly to the teacher and references his school. It also mentions neighbouring schools and offers a sales visit to his school’s region.
Let’s have a look how that email would need to be edited if your chosen recipients were Schools/Teachers in the Education Data module.
and now that same email, but this time the merge tags have been changed so they are suitable for Contacts in your CRM.
To utilise all merge tags when sending a personalised email to your contacts, you will need to make sure your data is tidy or that it has been linked to their profile within the education database. For example, if you had only imported a contact’s name and their organisation name as the only data fields you possess, any reference to their county or job title won’t be pulled into the email text if Campus doesn’t hold that information on them. Click
here for a guide on linking your contacts to their record in the Edu-Data.
Notice how every merge tag in the two emails differ. Fail to edit and use the correct tag for the correct recipient type and you could find your teachers receiving very random emails addressed not to their name but rather an [[incorrect_salutation]]
Any finally…
To be GDPR compliant, all email campaigns that you send must contain:
- Your company name and address
- The option to unsubscribe from your marketing
Both of these requirements are built into Campus, making it very easy for you to add these to your emails. Take a look again at the top ‘live email’ we sent to John Smith. Notice how CoffeeGo’s company name and address is pulled in to contact details by using the [[company_name_and_address_line]] Merge Tag. You'll notice when finding this required Merge Tag via an email built in the Drag 'n' Drop Builder, that the tag to use is:
Your Company Name and Address Line /Block (Required)
Remember that this field refers to
your company –
not the organisation you are sending your email campaign to.
Watch the short video below to see how your Company Name and Address will format in a live email campaign:
