When creating or editing an email or SMS template, you will likely notice options in the Subject and Message fields that say “Personalize.” Selecting this allows you to choose from a variety of personalization options including business information, contact information, website links, and more.
When you select one of these options, the system will automatically place the corresponding code into the field.
For example, if you select Business Name, the system will place “{{Business-Business Name}}” into the field. This is code that tells our system to automatically inject the Business Name belonging to the client you are emailing or texting.
Below, we will help you better understand how to incorporate personalization options into your account for use in future templates.
Creating New Contacts
Most of your personalization information will come directly from the data you have stored in your Contacts application. To start adding new contacts to your dashboard, navigate to the Contacts app by clicking the app drawer icon in the top right corner.
In the Contacts app, our platform sorts your information by People and Businesses. You can begin by adding a new person or business depending on what information you have available. First, we will add a new person to our contacts:
In the top right corner, click on “ + New Person.” You will go to a submenu that asks for basic starting information.
We created a profile for Dave Plumber in the example above. Note that you can qualify the lead status by using the dropdown in the field shown.
With your contact now added to the list, we’re going to add more information. Find the contact name on the app’s home page and hover over it until a blue eye icon appears. Click on this icon.
We now see a preview of all the information we have about Dave Plumber. As you click through the various dropdowns, you will see we don’t have much information for this new client. As you interact with the platform and set up deals, use attachments, or send InstaSites or InstaReports, the associated data will appear in Dave Plumber’s contact preview.
We want to add new information for Dave Plumber. We can do so by clicking the blue text at the bottom of this submenu that says “View Record.”
This is a contact page specifically for Dave Plumber. You can click on the widgets shown to browse, add, and edit data for this contact. This includes address, contact details, age, associated businesses, current deals, and much more. On the right side of the page, you can easily associate InstaReports and InstaSites with this client. You may also preview, buy, and send an InstaSite or InstaReport using this method.
Add as much information as necessary to complete your contact’s profile.Navigate back to the Contacts app. If you have yet to add any businesses to your Contacts and wish to associate your new person with one, click on the Businesses tab.
Similar to the steps above, click on “ + New Business” in the top right corner. Follow the prompts to add and save the business to your contacts. For our example, we created the business “Dave’s Plumbing.”
Finally, navigate back to the contact record for the newly added person. Click + under Associated Businesses and locate the newly added business within the dropdown. Click “Add” to complete. Dave Plumber will now be associated with Dave’s Plumbing.
Now that you’ve completed a profile for your contact, their contact details will now appear any time you send an SMS message or email using the Templates app. In the next section, we will walk you through how to inject these personalization options when creating a new template.
How to Add Personalization Options
Now that we successfully added contact and business information for our lead or client, we can take advantage of personalization options in templates to save time and effort moving forward.
To add personalization options to a template, we can begin by creating a new template or editing an existing template.
Within the template editing menu, note the buttons that say Personalize next to the Subject field and within the Message field. Note that SMS templates will not have a subject field. Click on Personalize.
Within the dropdown, you will see prompts to enter personalizations by Business, Person, InstaSites, InstaReports, and My Profile. The latter reference your personal information.
When you select one of these options (for this example, we will select Business Name), the corresponding field will populate with an API that calls for the associated Business Name. This will appear as “{{Business-Business Name}}” on our end.Whenever your client receives an email using this template, our system will automatically inject the data from your contacts and replace the Business Name code. When we use this template to email Dave Plumber from the example above, the message will appear as “Hi Dave’s Plumbing” instead of the injection API shown above.
You can add as many personalization options as necessary as long as you have the corresponding information within the personal or business contact profile.
Finally, be sure to test your template to ensure that your personalization options are working correctly within the template. You can do so by entering your desired email at the bottom of the menu.
Click Save at the top when you are satisfied with your template.
You now understand the basics of how to add personalization options to your templates. Utilizing this functionality will help you save time and money by taking advantage of the information that already exists within your account.
In the example above, any contact that receives your templated email will see their own name, business name, and other personal information without needing to create a separate email for each client. It will also save you from needing to keep track of information, website or InstaSites links, InstaReports links, and much more.