Message Personalization and Scripting

Introduction

With ListManager, you can easily create unique, one-to-one emails tailored to the exact needs and interests of your recipients, without having to create more than one message.

The easiest way to personalize your message is to use the Insert Field, Insert Condition, and Insert URL wizards when creating content. This section discusses how to manually insert these tags if you don't want to use the wizards, or if you'd like to do more advanced personalization and scripting.

There are four major categories of message personalization: Mail Merge, Clickthrough Tracking, Conditional Content, and Advanced Scripting.

Mail Merge Tags let you insert directly into your email messages information from your database, or from procedures ListManager performs. The classic example of this is to write "Dear Bob" in Bob's email, "Dear Mary" in Mary's, and so on.

Clickthrough Tracking, Opens and HTML Detection let you include tags that allow you to track the success of your mailing. They allow you to track clickthroughs, detect whether someone has opened your message, or whether or not a recipient has HTML capability.

Conditional Content Commands allow you to insert blocks of text into your message depending on whether certain conditions are true for a particular recipient. As a simple example, suppose you know that Bob has a dog, but Mary does not. You can tell ListManager to add a special paragraph promoting dog biscuits into all messages going to customers who have dogs. Bob would get this special paragraph in his email, while Mary would not.

Invite (Referral Feature) allows your members to invite their friends to join the list. List members click on a link, which takes them to a referral form. They fill in the names and email addresses of their friends, who receive an invitation to join the list

Advanced Scripting allows you to insert complex, highly dynamic content in your message. In ListManager, message personalization take advantage of a highly flexible programming language called Tcl. You don't have to be a great programmer to create and use custom scripts! This manual will show you a variety of easy templates for you to follow to create Tcl scripts. People with programming experience will also find that Tcl is a very powerful tool for extending the functionality of their messages.

How Do I Use ListManager's Personalization?

All mail merge tags, conditional content commands, and advanced scripts must begin and end with double percent signs (%%). Upon sending, ListManager will automatically replace the script with its appropriate result in the outgoing message.

For example:

%%merge members_.FullName%%

will be replaced by ListManager with the full name of the message recipient, or a blank if no name is in the database table.

If you want double percent signs (%%) to appear in the actual outgoing message for some reason, you can place a "\" before the "%%". The "\" will prevent the delimited script that immediately follows from being executed and replaced.

Note that your %%-delimited scripts will only work if you enable scripting in your list settings. If scripting is not enabled, then the script text will appear without being replaced.