When you create a Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional) mailing, you can use personalization to customize the mailing to your individual subscribers. This is a great way to engage your subscribers because they receive a message that has been tailored to them.
How does personalization work?
Personalization works by pulling the unique subscriber-specific values (such as first name, last name, title) from predefined fields in your integrated AMS/CRM database and then populating your messages with those subscriber-specific values at send time. Each subscriber is sent a message that has been customized with their unique values that were retrieved from your AMS/CRM database.
You can further build on personalization by caching those unique subscriber-specific values in Thrive Marketing Professional. When personalization cache is enabled, your designated personalization fields display as table columns in your Thrive Marketing Professional account.
TIP: Cached personalization values are more easily and quickly retrieved at send time.
Personalization fields
The following table lists the fields that can be used for personalizing your mailings.
TIP: Personalization fields can be typed directly into the body of a mailing. The Mailing Designer Code column displays the required format; these must be entered exactly as shown in order for the personalization to work.
NOTE: These are the same for all target groups.
| ID | Display Name | Mailing Designer Code |
|---|---|---|
| birthDate | Birth Date | %%WSI||birthDate%% |
| city | City | %%WSI||city%% |
| countryCode | Country Code | %%WSI||countryCode%% |
| countryDescr | Country Descr | %%WSI||countryDescr%% |
| county | County | %%WSI||county%% |
| displayName | Display Name | %%WSI||displayName%% |
| firstName | First Name | %%WSI||firstName%% |
| informalName | Informal Name | %%WSI||informalName%% |
| lastName | Last Name | %%WSI||lastName%% |
| middleName | Middle Name | %%WSI||middleName%% |
| postalCode | Post Code | %%WSI||postalCode%% |
| prefixName | Prefix Name | %%WSI||prefixName%% |
| province | Province | %%WSI||province%% |
| state | State | %%WSI||state%% |
| street1 | Street 1 | %%WSI||street1%% |
| street2 | Street 2 | %%WSI||street2%% |
| street3 | Street 3 | %%WSI||street3%% |
| suffixName | Suffix Name | %%WSI||suffixName%% |
Add personalizations to a mailing
Personalization is available in both Thrive Marketing Professional editors:
- Mailing Designer 1
- Message Designer 2
Use the instructions below for your message editor.
Mailing Designer 1
- Click the Personalization icon in the toolbar.
- Click the dropdown and choose Informz for Association Anywhere.
Message Designer 2
- Click the Personalization icon.
- Click the Personalization Type dropdown and select Integrated Personal Info.
- Click a personalization field to add it to the mailing.
Edit personalizations
An Admin in your Thrive Marketing Professional account can:
- edit two personalization fields: Display Name and Personalization Default.
- hide fields the prevent them being used for personalization.
To do either or both of these:
- Navigate to Admin > Setup > Bridge Configuration.
- Click List of Attributes (also leads to edit).
- Click Edit for a personalization field, and on the Attribute dialog:
- Attribute Use - Check the box (show) or uncheck it (hide), depending on whether you want the field to be available for personalization in Thrive Marketing Professional.
- Internal Name - The field name as found in the AMS/CRM database.
- Comment - Used for internal documentation about the use of a personalization fields.
- Data Element - The AMS/CRM database name of the field. This cannot be changed.
- Is Valid - Determines if the field is valid for personalizations.
- Display Name - Editable to provide a more descriptive name for Thrive Marketing Professional users.
- Personalization Default - This field is optional; it is used when there is not a value specified for this attribute for a subscriber. If specified, the personalization placeholder in the mailing will use the default value. To learn more, see Personalization Caching for Integrations.
Cache personalization values
You can cache (i.e., store locally) the unique subscriber-specific values of personalization fields in Thrive Marketing Professional to make those data more quickly accessible for your mailings.
- To do so, you have to enable personalization caching, as described in this section.
When personalization caching is enabled, your designated personalization fields display as table columns in your Thrive Marketing Professional account.
NOTE: Cached personalization data are automatically refreshed once a week; they can also be manually refreshed by an Admin.
Enable personalization caching
You have to individually select the personalization fields that you want cached in Thrive Marketing Professional.
NOTE: You can select a maximum of 20 personalization fields to cache.
- In the Admin interface, navigate to Setup > Bridge Configuration.
- Click List of Attributes to open the list.
- Check the boxes in the Caches Data column for the fields you want to cache.
You can also edit a field and check/uncheck the Caches data box:
Manually refresh cached personalization data
Cached personalization data are automatically refreshed once a week so that the data are as up to date as possible. The cached data can also be manually refreshed by an Admin.
- In the Admin interface, navigate to Setup > Bridge Configuration.
- Click the Refresh Personalization Cache button.
Information about the most recent refresh ("sync") displays below the button.
Test personalizations
To test your personalizations:
- Open the Target Group information pop-up window and click the Subscribers tab.
- Click Columns in the toolbar to open the column chooser, and add the personalization fields that you want to preview.
- Click OK to save your changes.
The personalization fields that you chose display as columns.
NOTE: When you publish a mailing to a remote subscriber, Thrive Marketing Professional inserts personalization values based on the tiered-approach logic that is described in Personalization Caching for Integrations.