Email Marketing News and Tips

 If you are a BlastWizard user, you probably know by now that you can merge a number of recipient data using predefined merge codes that can be accessed from inside the HTML Editor. This has been covered in a previous blog article by one of my colleagues. In this article, I will attempt to explain how you can merge custom recipient data, whose fields cannot be mapped over, and therefore do not show in the Editor’s “Merge Codes” dropdown menu. Here is how you can do it:

1. Prepare your recipient list and make sure that it has all the data to be merged in one field/column for all recipients on the list to avoid blank results. The top row of your recipient list must also include appropriate names for the different fields/columns.
2. Upload your recipient list to BlastWizard by going to the “Lists” section and clicking on “Upload New”.
3. Check the box where it says “The first line of the uploaded file contains field names”.
4. Use the field names in the column dropdown menus to map at least the “email address” field from your list. You can map other fields as well if you intend to use the predefined merge codes in the HTML Editor. Leave the field name for the column you want to create the custom merge code for as “Undefined”.
5. Edit your HTML and text document by following this merge code format:          `merge:field nameNote that the first character is a “tick” which can be found on the same key as “tilde”.
6. Save your document and proceed with setting up your email job by sending to the recipient list with the custom merge data.

Can you have a link with an embedded custom field in the URL?

Sure! You can use the above custom code to replace all or part of your URL string so each recipient will be directed to a different link or page. You cannot though embed a merge code to replace the entire URL. Here is an example of a URL with custom merge code:
          http://www.mydomain.com/page.aspx?id=`merge:code
Can you use custom merge codes to render different images for different recipients?

Using the same custom merge code format from above, you can actually replace the entire link to the image that you want to customize. You will need to make sure that in your recipients list you have a column that has the all absolute links to the different images. Here is an example of an image tag with custom merge code:
          <img src=”`merge:code” width=”50″ height=”50″>