What You'll Learn
How to personalize messages with tokens
The different tokens you can use
Related Topics:
Campaigns451 is all about customization and personalization of emails and SMS messages with the student in mind. We want you to be able to address each student by name and reference details from their profile and other data points found in your Element instance that help make your communication useful and unique — even when that communication is going out to many people at once! Tokens are a great way to do this.
Tokens are essentially a small bit of code that works like a placeholder. When you're writing a message, you see the token as something like [user:intended_major] in your text. When the person receiving the message sees the message, the token is replaced with real content. For example, if Student A is an intended major Biology and Student B has intended major Accounting, [user:intended_major] would be replaced with Biology in the message for Student A and Accounting in the message for Student B.
On this page, we'll explain how to use tokens, and provide a list of common tokens you can insert into messages.
How to Use Tokens
Including a token in your email and SMS messages is simple. All you need to do is enter the token text enclosed in brackets [ ] in the content of your message.
Where to use them:
The subject line of an email
Body of an email or SMS message
Example
The following images show where you can add a token to the Subject Line, Preview Text, and SMS text of your campaigns.
If you are wanting to add tokens to the body of a campaign, simply highlight your text and select "Insert Token".
How to insert a token with a custom field
To create a custom token you can use the custom field slug, hyphens, and add "user:" to the front of it.
For example, the below custom slugs become the below tokens:
Slug: user-custom-demo1-dietary-explain
Slug: user-custom-demo1-dietary-restrictions
Token: [user:user-custom-demo1-dietary-explain]
Token: [user:user-custom-demo1-dietary-restrictions]
What happens if there is no data for the token to pull?
Let's say you have a token for a middle name, but the student didn't enter a middle name. The space will be empty because there is no data to be collected. Therefore, we advise that you mindfully include tokens that have data to be included in the campaigns.
Tokens During Campaign Testing
Remember, tokens (and the data they represent) are associated with a particular person's record. This means you will not see token replaced if you test your message using an email address or phone number.
To test token content, you'll need to send to a segment of test records that have profiles inside Element451.