How do I add personalisation to my emails? Can I also have alternative text for contacts without a field populated?

You can personalise your emails with any of the contact information you have collected in a custom field in the Mail House. 

To add personalisation to an article, simply click the Personal Field button in the article block editor.

Once you click it, a pop-up windows will appear and will let you choose the field you want to add:

 

We recommend that you enter a general alternative to the field in question that will be substituted wherever that piece of information is missing for a recipient. For example, if you choose First Name as the field to be used for personalisation, but there is no entry within the database for a particular recipient's first name field, then your alternate text will be inserted within your story instead. An example might be 'friend', 'colleague', 'customer', 'shareholder', etc.

If you do not want any alternate term or phrase to be substituted for missing information then leave this field blank and click OK.

The personalisation code will look something like this:

{#FIELD(TITLE)#}

If needed, you can enter multiple fields in any order you require, so, for instance, if you wish to include personalisation which welcomes the reader by title, first name and last name, you would enter something like:

"Welcome, {#FIELD(TITLE)#} {#FIELD(FIRST_NAME)#} {#FIELD(LAST_NAME)#}!"

In this case, when a reader opens up their newsletter, it would read something like: "Welcome, Dame Edna Everage!"

 

To test out if your personalised email works, just go to the email you have created and hit the button Choose Preview Recipient located at the upper right hand:

 

 

Once you click the button, it will let you choose which recipient you'd like to view. Just type the name and hit search button, check the name you want to test and then hit select.

 

After that, click the Desktop Preview icon and you will then see the custom fields are pulled up successfully: