Personalization

Personalization 

Personalizing your newsletters will strongly influence the effectiveness of your e-mail campaign. An individualized newsletter will appeal to your subscribers, who will appreciate its custom-made contents about their personal interests. This means that you will get more attention on the subscribers’ side. 

Personalization by using variables (placeholders) 

The most common form of personalization works by way of parameters. These “dummies” are replaced by data from the respective subscriber data set at the time of sending. The dummies/variables are bracketed by double '$' ($ $ [PLATZHALTER] $ $). You should not use any additional "$ $" character strings in the source code of the newsletter. An example of a salutation would look like this:

Hello $$TITLE$$ $$FIRSTNAME$$ $$LASTNAME$$,

This would be replaced by

Hello, Mr. John Smith,

As a salutation, this is not strictly correct. But BACKCLICK automatically recognizes the gender of the subscriber. For this reason, BACKCLICK frequently looks at the data set field that has been defined for gender, such as GENDER, SALUTATION, SEX, etc. From the contents of these fields, BACKCLICK tries to draw conclusions about gender. There are three possible results: 

1. Male
2. Female
3. None of the above (often used for companies or families)

The results of this evaluation may be put into the source code of the newsletter. For this reason, you may use the freely definable form of 3. The advantage is that you can fix a freely definable text for each of the three possible results. 

$$male ending$female ending$neutral ending$$

It is also possible to use a form of 2: 

$$male ending$female ending$$

An example of use:

Dear$$Reader$$ $$Mister$Misses$$ $$LASTNAME$$,

This would then be replaced by: 

Dear Mr. Warren:

Other variables 

Other variables may be inserted into the source code of your newsletter. These are in addition to the variables from the database designer, and take the form of 2 or 3. They generate the current date, or else the link for the “Click ‘n’ Leave” function. 

• $$READONLINE-LINK$$ (The newsletter will be opened in the subscriber’s browser)
• $$APIDATE$$ (Enters the date and time at the time of sending)
• $$UNSUBSCRIBE-LINK$$ (Enters a personalized URL into the newsletter. By clicking on this link, the subscriber will be automatically unsubscribed)
• $$EMAIL$$ (E-Mail address of the subscriber)

Individualization 

By using individualization, you can build complex queries and display the results within the newsletter. This lets you make reference to the personal interests of the subscribers. Depending on their respective data sets, contents will be shown or removed from the individualized newsletters. The following is a brief example; please see Chapter "Individualization". 

Example No. 1 (Differentiation on TITLE):

<GIS>
IF($$TITLE$$ EQUALS "Mister") { PRINT "Dear Mister $$LASTNAME$$," }
IF($$TITLE$$ EQUALS "Misses") { PRINT "Dear Misses $$LASTNAME$$," }
IF($$TITLE$$ EQUALS "Family") { PRINT "Dear $$LASTNAME$$s" }
</GIS>

Example No. 2 (Birthday E-mail):

 <GIS>
IF( "$$APIDATE$$" STARTS "$$BIRTHDAY$$" )
  { PRINT
    { Happy Birthday!!! Today is your birthday!}}
ELSE{ SKIP THIS RECIPIENT}
</GIS>