Beyond delivering personalized email campaigns based on Optimove’s powerful Target Groups, you can customize the content of emails sent by OptiMail using “personalization tags.” These tags allow you to create email templates that change dynamically for each recipient.

For example, you can customize the email’s subject line using the recipients’ first name, leading to increased open rates. Another example: you can use the recipient’s favorite products to personalize the graphics in the email, making it much more appealing to each customer. You can customize the links in the email to point to each customer's most relevant landing page.

Preparing to Use OptiMail Personalization Tags

You can use these tags in any email template’s subject line and/or up to 100 personalization tags in an email body.

To set up Customer Attributes as tags:

1. Navigate to 'Attributes' under the Data Studio section in the left navigation bar

2. Select the relevant attribute you would like to use as a Personalization Tag, and click on Edit, via the three dots. Please note that only published attributes can be set as Personalization Tags.

3. Check the “Use as personalization tag” checkbox and click the Update button to save your work.

Personalizing Text

Once you’ve set up your tags, you can use them in any email template’s subject line and/or up to 100 Personalization Tags in an email body.

To do so in the HTML Editor:

While editing an email template, select the desired tag from the "Personalization" tag list associated with the "Subject" line and/or email body, as highlighted here:

To do so in the Visual Editor:

While editing an email template, select the desired tag from the Personalization Tag list associated with the Subject line and/or email body (in text content blocks), as highlighted here:

Tags appearing in the template will be automatically replaced with the specific value available for each recipient when the campaign is generated. In the example above, the [%FIRST_NAME%] tag will be replaced with the first name of each email recipient.

Personalizing Images and Links

You can also use tags to dynamically deliver particular images and/or links, based on customer data. For example, you can build an email template that customizes a banner image based on each recipient’s favorite product category. You can also include dynamic links within the email that point different customers to different web pages based on their past behavior.

Before sending out emails with customized images/links, you will need to prepare the various images and/or landing pages and make them available on your Web server. A different image/landing page will be required for each possible value of the tag you will use for customization. This is because the value of the tag will form part of the URL that points to the image/webpage.

The following example will help explain how to personalize an image according to a customer database field ([%FAVORITE_CATEGORY%]:

You want to use the [%FAVORITE_CATEGORY%] tag to customize the email’s banner image.
The database has 20 different values for this field, such as dresses, shoes, and skirts.
Your email template will contain an image link that appears as
<img src=”https://www.happypanda.com/images/[%FAVORITE_CATEGORY%].jpg” />.
You will prepare 20 different banner images to be hosted on your website, named according to each possible tag value:

Tag Value	Image URL
Dresses	https://www.happypanda.com/images/dresses.jpg
Shoes	https://www.happypanda.com/images/shoes.jpg
Skirts	https://www.happypanda.com/images/skirts.jpg
...	...

Once all the images are available on your website, you can run a campaign using a template that contains the image URL, https://www.happypanda.com/images/[%FAVORITE_CATEGORY%].jpg. The actual favorite category of each recipient will be used to build the relevant URL and lead to the right image to be displayed.

The same applies to landing page links: prepare the appropriate landing pages and insert the tag that will customize the link to those pages, such as:
<a href=”https://www.happypanda.com/landingpages/[%FAVORITE_CATEGORY%]”> … </a>.

Important implementation notes:

All image/link URLs must be located in the same domain defined for your OptiMail account. In other words, images and linked landing pages cannot be located on a third-party site.
All image/link URLs must be entered manually in the email template body editor by typing in the tag placeholder where the value will appear, as seen in the examples above. Any Personalization Tags will be lost if you attempt to add the link using the editor’s import options (Import Template or Import Image). This is because the import function causes the image to be uploaded and hosted on the Optimove content delivery network (CDN), and an automatically generated URL is inserted into the email.
When you’ve completed crafting your template, click the Validate link to confirm that all the tags used are valid and available.

When testing email templates that include Personalization Tags to check how unique content will render, select "Data for customer ID" when using Optimail's Send Test action. Here, you can enter the Customer ID, or CID, of a specific customer from your customer table and the email address you want to receive the test at, and now, you'll see the test email as though you were that customer. This is a great way to check each template version that uses personalization tags - whether they populate content directly in your template as text or via conditional statements to render images dynamically.

Personalization Tags for Triggered Campaigns

You can use event parameters as personalization tags when creating templates for Triggered real-time campaigns.

To do so, click on Personalization as usual from the HTML or Visual Editor, and select your tag from the Activity Data tab.

Screen Shot 2023-11-07 at 11.18.05.png

Please note:

Real-time Personalization Tags must be associated with the event(s) that triggered the campaign. For example, if an "added_to_wishlist" event triggered the campaign, and it includes the parameters "item_category" and "item_name" but does not include "item_price" - only "item_category" and "item_name" can be used as personalization tags in the template, but "item_price" cannot.