What are Smart Codes?
Smart codes are snippets of placeholder text that you can add to Text Box Content Blocks in Email Marketing to personalize your messages. Simply enter a smart code in your message and when the recipient receives your email, the system will have automatically substituted the smart code for the relevant piece of information from the Contact's profile and transactions.
Note: Another name for a smart code is a merge tag.
How does a Smart Code look?
Here's how the Smart Code will look in your Email Marketing:
Here is what the Contact will receive:
Where can I find Smart Codes?
When designing your Email Marketing, you can access a list of available smart codes by clicking on the Smart Code button in the Text Box editor. You will also find Smart Codes available in Direct Mail and your Acknowledgement Letters (Organization Settings). Smart Codes are not compatible within the Receipt Details.
What fields are compatible with Smart Codes?
- Smart Name
- Full Name
- Preferred Name
- First Name
- Middle Name
- Last Name
- Name Title
- Name Suffix
- Company
- Position
- Primary Email
- Primary Phone
- Primary Address*
- Receipt Password (learn more here)
- Last Donation Amount
- Last Revenue Amount
- Date of Last Donation
- Date of Last Revenue
- Dedication of Last Donation
- Campaign of Last Donation
- Campaign of Last Revenue
- Impact Area of Last Donation
- Impact Area of Last Revenue
- Total Donations Last Fiscal Year
- Total Donations This Fiscal Year
- Total Revenues This Fiscal Year
- Total Revenues Last Fiscal Year
Note that Primary Address will be formatted as shown below:
What does the "Smart Name" smart code do?
Of all of the smart codes, Smart Name is the most special. It's a dynamic smart code that will automatically pick the best name option for your Contact! The smart name code will automatically check the names that are available on your Contact's profile and update itself with the best one in the following order:
(1) Preferred Name
Does your Contact have a nickname or perhaps a middle name that they prefer to be referred to as? Are you sending this email to multiple people from the same household? If you have something populated in the Preferred Name field, the smart name will choose it first.
(2) First Name
Not everyone has a nickname. If this is the case, the next stop on the list will be the first name of your contact.
(3) Full Name / Organization Name
If your Contact doesn't have the two name types listed above, the system will automatically replace the smart name code with either the Contact's Full name or, if they are an Organization, their Organization's name.
(4) No Name
In the case where a Contact does not have any of the above three names filled in, the Smart Name field will remain blank. For example, rather than reading 'Hello {Preferred Name}' it will read 'Hello'.
My Smart Code isn't working
In order for a Smart Code to work, it needs to be able to pull the information that it needs from your Contacts' profiles. There are two scenarios where a Smart Code will not work:
(1) Test Email Marketing
If you send yourself a Test Email Marketing from Keela, a copy of your Email Marketing will be sent directly to your inbox. This information is being pulled from your Keela user account and not a specific Contact Profile. Because of this, there's no information to pull to replace the smart code.
(2) Contact information is missing
If you use a First Name, Preferred Name, Last Name, etc., smart code, and this chosen name type is not listed on a Contact's profile, there will be no information to replace the smart code with. This is why using the Smart Name smart code is really useful - if a name type in the contact information is missing, it will look for another name type in that specific contact to replace the smart code with.
In both situations, the smart code will appear as it was originally inputted into the email (ie. {{firstname}})
FAQ
A few of my contacts have more than one Company and Position linked to their account. How will this work?
The {{Company}} and {{position}} smart codes take the first instance in the associations' list. Any subsequent companies or positions will not be included.