Adding new contact property variables

Before you can use contact property variables to personalise your templates, you first need to define these in the Campaigning Channel Editor in the File Mapping field. This will populate the dropdown selections in the Email builder when defining contact properties in your email copy or subject line.

Note: The File Mapping field in the channel editor only produces the contact property dropdown options in the email builder, and aren’t included in the output file. These relate to the individual and are not transactional.

Defined variables from your Apteco system, known as Additional Variables in the channel editor, automatically go into the output file.

Marketing and Transactional email templates are the same when it comes to contact property variables.

Adding a new contact property variable

To add a new contact property variable:

1. Click the Profile icon, then Application settings.

   

2. Click Campaigning Channel Editor, select your Apteco Email channel from the list.

   

3. Click Parameters, and then in the File Mapping field, add your new contact property name.

   

   Note: You must enter the variables in lowercase with no spaces.

   Note: There is currently no way of deleting your mistakes, so make sure your variable name is correct before saving.

   Note: Any variables defined here must relate to variables in the Contact table in the system design in Designer.

4. Click Save All Changes.

You’ve now added a new variable you can use in your templates.

The variable is now available for you to select when adding a contact property to your email template.

Note: The variable names entered in File Mapping don’t need to align with the variable names used in your Apteco system. For example, you can enter firstname despite the reciprocal variable in the system being called First Name.

Adding multiple contact property variables

You can also add multiple contact property variables in the channel editor.

To do this:

1. Follow steps 1-3 above.

2. Enter each contact property name, following the same rules of lowercase and with no spaces. Entries must be in the form of a pipe delimited list as seen in the screenshot below.

   

These multiples variables now appear in the Insert variable dialogue.

Additional variables

You can add additional variables from your Apteco system under the Additional Variables tab.

Note: Additional variables differ from contact properties. Any variables you list here are always included in the output file.