Use variable collections effectively (next-level personalization)

Step right into some next-level personalization. Your ticket is reading the variable collections and adding a personalized email sender first!

Then, follow me and I'll show you how to use all that in a beautiful example where you'll be able to see them in their full glory. 

Ready? Let's start!

A beautiful example 

Let's say that you are a company with 3 retailers (if you already are, let's say you are "you"), and your retailers have 100 contacts each (300 in total). You want to send personalized emails to all 300. Each contact should receive the email from its relevant retailer. The email needs to contain the retailer's contact person information like their portrait, email address, name and mobile.
Three different people, three different retailers, three hundred contacts - only one sending.

Setting up the parameters

First, the setting up of the variable collection. Re-check that part again, but basically you:

• add a collection of variables with 3 retailers as records; 
• add more fields in the records (like the 'portrait' and 'mobile' fields) and the values in them. For the portrait, you can simply add any hosted image's URL.
• When you have added retailers, add the contacts accordingly to each retailer - the process is the same as for segments (this is usually done on file import).
• Add your retailers as personal senders for each contact. 

Now that you have all your retailers and their contacts all sorted up, it's time to use them in your communication! 

Using the variables in the editor

• Go to the email campaign.
• There's a module with an image and text. The image will be the portrait of the retailer and the text will be the info of the retailer's contact person.  
• Let's start with personalizing the image:
  • hover over the image and choose Change;
  • click the Link to external image button;
  • hover over the field, and when the variable icon shows up, click on it and choose the retailer portrait field. Since we previously added the image URL to the portrait field - it will automatically change the image for each retailer for every contact. 
• Moving on to the retailer information - the process is the same for the variable collections like when inserting regular variables.
  • Add the variable for the retailer's email first, so the text would be something like: Contact me on my email: (here we insert the variable).
  • You can make clicking the retailer's email to immediately open a new email draft:
    • Select the text you want linked 
    • Click the link icon and choose the Custom link.
    • In the field, add mailto:retailer:emailVariable - this will change the retailer's email for each contact and also make it a clickable link.
    • Continue with adding the retailer's name and mobile variables in the module. 
    • In the email sender, select your Collection to include the personalized email senders.

All done! Great, now that you've personalized the email you can preview the email for some contacts and see if the variables change accordingly. Check out the above video to see this in action! When you are sure that's all in place, go right ahead and send that communication like a boss. 😎