Using JSON custom fields for email personalization

Using JSON custom fields for email personalization

Using JSON custom fields for email personalization

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Octeth features explained in this article are available in Octeth v5.0.2 and higher versions.

Introduction

The Octeth Email Marketing Platform allows you to send real-time, automated, and triggered messages to your subscribers. In order to do so, Octeth allows you to customize the messages you send. The main customization options are through Custom Fields (subscriber attributes) and Dynamic Content.

Custom Fields allows you to use the data you already have in Octeth to personalize messages you send to your subscribers.

Dynamic Content allows you to use the data you already have in Octeth to send messages with content that changes based on the message recipient.

This article provides an overview of the use cases and examples of Custom Fields and Dynamic Content.

Custom Fields

Octeth allows you to use fields from your subscriber lists to personalize your messages. For example, you can use Custom Fields to include a first name in the greeting of your message, or you can use Custom Fields to customize the email subject and body based on fields in the subscriber list.

For more details about custom field management, please refer to here:

Custom Fields
Custom Fields

JSON Custom Fields

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is a lightweight format for storing and transporting data. JSON is often used when data is sent from a server to a web page or a platform. JSON is "self-describing" and easy to understand.

Instead of creating a separate custom field for each subscriber attribute you have (sometimes, you may have tens, hundreds of attributes), you can create a single custom field and store your entire recipient attribute in JSON format. For example, you have a set of attributes for your subscribers:

  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • Purchased Product
  • Last Purchase Date
  • Purchase Amount

You can create separate custom fields for each one of these recipient attriburtes and then use then to personalize your email content. This is a handy approach if you have a few attributes.

However, if you have tens, hundreds of attributes, creating and managing these custom fields can be challenging. Instead, you can just create a single custom field and store all attributes inside this custom field as a JSON data:

{
	"FirstName": "John",
	"LastName": "Weber",
	"PurchasedProduct": "Octeth Email Marketing Software",
	"LastPurchaseDate": "2022-10-01",
	"PurchaseAmount": 5524.50
}
Here’s an example JSON data which can be stored inside a single custom field.

Email Personalization with JSON Custom Fields

Let’s say you have two custom fields:

  • Custom Field #1 → Company Name
  • Custom Field #2 → JSON Data

Now, let’s personalize the email subject and content with this information and the JSON data shown above.

Email Subject:

{{ CustomField2.FirstName }}, your order details...

Email Content:

Hey {{ CustomField2.FirstName }} 👋,

Thanks once again for your recent purchase. We are happy to support {{ CustomField1 }} with our enterprise-grade solutions.

Below, you can find your recent purchase information:

- Purchased Product: {{ CustomField2.PurchasedProduct }}
- Purchase Date: {{ fn_dateformat value="{{ CustomField2.LastPurchaseDate }}" format="jS M, Y" }}
- Purchase Amount: ${{ fn_number_format value="{{ CustomField2.PurchaseAmount }}" ds="." ts="," }}

For any questions or comments, do not hesitate to reach out. I will be happy to provide any support you need to {{ CustomField1 }}.

Regards,

As you can see above, we have used to merge tags:

  • {{ CustomField1 }} → This represents the custom field ID #1 value for each recipient in the queue. In this example, it’s the company name.
  • {{ CustomField2 }} → This represents the custom field ID #2 vaule, which is the JSON data. Each JSON key becomes a key of CustomField2;
    • CustomField2.FirstName
CustomField2.LastName
CustomField2.PurchasedProduct
CustomField2.LastPurchaseDate
CustomField2.Purchaseamount
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For more details about email personalization, conditional personalization, personalization helper functions, and JSON personalization, please refer to this article.
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