Personalization and conditional content (smart content)
Use variables to swap in a name, a company and any field on the record inside the email, hide a passage when the field is empty and, in campaigns, replace the whole subject and body based on a rule about the recipient profile.
An email that opens with Hi there, no name, reads like a machine wrote it. Personalization fixes that by swapping variables for each recipient data at send time, and conditional content prevents the opposite problem, which is the broken sentence you get when a field is empty.
Available variables
- {{name}} and {{nome}}: the recipient name.
- {{email}}: the recipient email address.
- {{company}} and {{empresa}}: the company tied to the record.
- {{first_name}}: the first name.
- {{title}} and {{cargo}}: the job title.
- Any other field on the record by its own name, for example {{city}} or {{segment}}.
A field with no value becomes empty text, and the variable never shows up written out in the customer email. The CRM also guards against leaking internal identifiers: if a lookup field could not be resolved to a readable name, it comes out empty instead of showing a code.
Conditional content
Wrap the passage that only makes sense when the field is filled in. The form is {{#if field}}text{{/if}}, and there is a variation with an alternative: {{#if field}}text A{{else}}text B{{/if}}. A blank field, a zero and the values false and no all count as empty.
Hi {{name}}, {{#if company}}I saw you are at {{company}} and{{else}}I came across your profile and{{/if}} wanted to show you an idea.Where personalization works
- Bulk email sends, on the Email tab of Marketing: it works, and the hint on the screen reminds you of the main variables.
- Email, task and notification steps inside flows and campaigns: they work, including in the subject.
- Email sequences: today the text of a sequence step goes out exactly as written, with no variable substitution. Write sequence steps without relying on {{name}}, or build the personalized touch as a campaign or a flow.
Flow message steps have two extra features: a default value, written as {{field|fallback text}}, which uses the fallback text when the field is empty, and text variation, written as {option A|option B|option C}, which picks one of the options in a fixed way per recipient, so the same lead always sees the same version while your sends are not all identical to each other.
Rule based smart content
On the Email tab of Marketing there is a collapsible Smart content section. There you build rules that replace the entire subject and body according to the profile of the person receiving it. The first matching rule wins; if none matches, the default content applies.
- Open Smart content and click Add rule.
- Fill in the Field, for example lifecycle_stage.
- Choose the operator: is equal to, is not, contains or is filled in. With is filled in, the value box disappears.
- Enter the Value, write the Subject for this rule (optional) and the Body for this rule.
Smart content on landing pages
Landing pages have their own smart content section, which swaps the headline and the text based on the visitor country, the device, the marketing lists the contact belongs to, or a parameter arriving in the URL, such as the campaign source. For the page to recognize the contact and personalize by list, the links in your emails have to point at it with the contact identifier in the URL.
Common questions
- How do I test before sending? The email preview resolves the variables against a sample contact, with a fictional name, company and job title.
- I wrote {{Name}} with a capital letter and it did not work. Use the field name exactly as it exists on the record.
- Can I personalize the subject? Yes, in campaigns and flows the subject goes through the same substitution as the body.
- Do smart content rules apply in a sequence or a flow? No. They live in bulk email sends.