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How to Use Personalization in Your Email Campaign

By Hypermail • Updated December 31, 2025 • 2 views

Personalization lets you address your contacts directly and improve engagement in your campaigns. You can personalize the subject line, from name, and body of your message.

Personalization Tag Format

To insert a personalized field, use: <#columnname#>

  • columnname is the name of a column in your list, written in lowercase.
Example:
If your list has columns firstname and lastname, you could write:

Hello <#firstname#> <#lastname#>,

The system will automatically insert the recipient's first and last name from your list.

Using Default Values for Empty Fields

If a field is empty for a contact, you can specify a default value: <#fieldname|defaultvalue#>

Example:
Dear <#firstname|marketing manager#>,

If firstname is empty, this will appear as:
Dear marketing manager,

You can use default values in both the subject line and the body of your message.

Personalizing Links

You can also personalize links by inserting field values into URLs.

  • After the ? (query string) in a URL: Use [![fieldname]!]
Example:
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?firstname=[![firstname]!]&lastname=[![lastname]!]
  • In subfolders or path parts of a URL: Use the standard tag:
Example:
http://www.yoursite.com/<#firstname#>

Field names correspond to the headers in your contact list (e.g., firstname, customerid). Field names should be lowercase and contain only numbers or letters.

Tip: If you're experiencing encoding issues with personalized URLs, you can turn off "URL Encode Personalized Fields" in the System Settings of the Email Marketing section.

Important Notes

  • Personalization only works during an actual campaign send, not in preview emails. This is because a contact list is required to supply data to the tags.

Advanced: Conditional Template Language

You can show or hide content based on field values in your list, or run loops, using our Conditional Template Language available in both HTML and plain text messages. Supported statements include if, elseif, else, for, foreach, break, and continue.
Read our Conditional Template Language FAQ for details and examples.

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