Personalisation in Dotdigital

Personalisation is a tool in Dotdigital which lets you use data from Spektrix to personalise your Email Campaigns.

Before starting, make sure you’re familiar with:

What is Personalisation?

Personalisation lets you include Customer data from Spektrix in your Dotdigital Email Campaigns.

The data displays dynamically based on the Customer. For example, if the customer’s name is Sajid then the email will read ‘Hi Sajid.’

Dotdigital automatically populates some Default Data Fields from Spektrix, including Title, First Name and Last Name.

You can also sync other data from Spektrix using Tags or Customer Attributes into Custom Data Fields.

Formal and Informal Salutations

You can use a combination of these fields to generate a formal or informal greeting in your emails, depending on how you wish to address each Customer. For example, you may wish to use a formal greeting for a gala invite or an informal greeting for a Membership renewal email.

Formal Salutation or Informal Salutation are Pre-built Custom Data Fields which combine Title, First Name and Last Name data fields.

FORMALSALUTATION will combine the Title and Last name of the Customer if there is one present.
‘Ms Lastname’.
INFORMALSALUTATION will display the First name of the Customer if there is one present that is more than one character long.
‘Firstname’

TIP: Sometimes Customers who register online might choose to only supply a first initial rather than a first name. Using an INFORMALSALUTATION rather than the first name data field means you can add a default value which will display if a customer only has one character in their first name field.

You can learn how to set up these Pre-Built Custom Data Fields in the Data Fields in Dotdigital article.

How to use Personalisation

You can use Personalisation in the following elements of your Email Campaign:

Subject Line or From name
In the body of your Email Campaign

Before using Personalisation, you’ll first need to make sure you have set up the Custom Data Fields you’ll need.

You can create Custom Data Fields by syncing data from Tags, Customer Attributes or Calculated Metrics in Spektrix.

Follow the steps in How to sync Custom Data Fields to sync any Tags or Customer Attributes.

Subject Lines and From Names

When setting up your Campaign Details, you can insert Contact Data fields to personalise your emails.

This will appear as a placeholder with the name of your Contact Data Field.

To do this, select the personalisation icon next to the Subject line or Friendly from name.

This will show your available Contact Data Fields.
Select the Data Field you’d like to use to personalise your Subject line or Friendly from name:

You’ll see the selected data field inserted as a placeholder into your template between two @ signs:

When the email is sent, the data field will display the data of the Customer who receives the email.

For example, if a Customer has the Customer Attribute ‘PREFERREDNAME’ with a value of Susan, the email subject line will display ‘Susan’ where the placeholder is.

If the Customer who receives the email does not have an Attribute value, the placeholder will display the default value of the Contact Data Field. The default value can contain a generic response or be blank.

Email Content

When designing your email campaign, you can insert Contact Data fields to personalise your content.

This will appear as a placeholder with the name of your Contact Data Field.

To add personalisation into a content block, click on the place in the content where you want to add the personalisation. This should be within one of the titles or text content blocks.
Then, click the DATA FIELDS button from the navigation menu:

This will show your available Contact Data Fields.
Select the Data Field you’d like to use to personalise your email:

You’ll see the selected data field inserted into your template between two @ signs:

When the email is sent, the data field will display the data of the Customer who receives the email.

For example, if a customer’s name is Sarah, the @INFORMALSALUTATION@ placeholder will display ‘Sarah’.

If the Customer who receives the email does not have more than one character in their first name, the placeholder will display the default value of the Contact Data Field.

Personalisation and Dynamic Content

You can use a Dynamic Content block with Personalisation to be able to set different Variations on your Personalisation.

For example, if you have a ‘preferred name’ Customer Attribute in Spektrix you could sync this with Dotdigital: ATT_PREFERREDNAME.

Customers who don’t have a value in the the ‘preferred name’ Attribute will see the default value of the data field. To prevent this, you could set up a Dynamic Content block so that those customers instead receive the INFORMALSALUTATION.

To do this you would set up a Dynamic Content block with the rule: ATT_PREFERREDNAME field is not blank.