Search

Personalisation in Dotdigital

Kyle Tarbuck
Kyle Tarbuck
  • Updated

The customer record in Spektrix allows each customer to have three name fields by default - Title, First Name and Last Name. If you use our integration with dotdigital, you can use a combination of these fields to generate a formal or informal greeting in your emails, depending on what each customer has in their record.

For example, you might want to send two different campaigns:

  • A VIP email about membership benefits to all of your members
  • A message about free beer to all of the students in your database

In your VIP email you’ll probably want to use a formal greeting and say something like Dear Ms Lastname.

On the other hand, you probably want the student email to be more informal, such as Hi Firstname.

In order to do this, you can add two fields into dotdigital – Formal Salutation and Informal Salutation.

NOTE: both of these fields are also available as Output fields in Customer Lists.

How do I set this up?

First you need to set dotdigital to be able to use these fields, by adding in two new Contact Data Fields. Here’s how:

  • Log in to dotdigital
  • Go to the Contacts menu and choose the Contact data fields option:

mceclip0.png

  • Click the Add new button, and you’ll see a pop-up for Create new field:

 

  • Fill in the fields on this pop-up:
    • Name: a unique name for the data field. Use the two fields as follows, making sure you enter them exactly as written (you can’t use spaces here)
      • FORMALSALUTATION 
      • INFORMALSALUTATION 
    • Data type: a dropdown menu for the type of data - choose Text here
    • Default value: if a customer doesn’t have enough of the details to form one of the greetings, you can use this to choose what will display
      • For example Friend or Supporter (i.e. Dear Friend)
    • Access: the option to allow dotdigital contacts to edit this information. Make sure this is set to private, as default.
  • Once you’ve filled everything in, click the Save button

You’ll need to follow this process twice – once for each salutation.

A note on default values
It’s worth making sure that you fill in the Default value field for each data field, to handle any customers without all of the name fields.

Informal Greeting: if there is a first name for the customer in Spektrix (which isn’t just an initial) then you will get the First Name field (i.e. Annie); otherwise it will revert to your default text

Formal Greeting: if there is a title and a surname for the customer in Spektrix then you will get Title Surname (i.e. Ms Pearce); otherwise it will revert to your default text.

How do I add these fields in dotdigital?

First off, set up your email template in dotdigital as usual, using the Easy Editor. Once the template is ready, place your cursor at the point where you want to insert a greeting and click the Data fields button in the toolbar:

 

  • Clicking that button will open the Data fields pop-up on the right-hand side of your screen, from where you can choose which data field you want to add:

 

  • Select INFORMALSALUTATION or FORMALSALUTATION as required
  • You’ll see the selected data field inserted into your template between two @ signs:

 

  • When the template is used in a campaign, your custom data field will now pull through the relevant data!

***

If you have any questions about personalisation in dotdigital, please get in touch with the Spektrix Support team.