Using variable tags in Constant Contact email, landing page, and SMS editors

Using the correct syntax for variable tags throughout the content of your emails, or the body content of your SMS messages and landing pages

Important: If you’re not comfortable using HTML code, our email, landing page, and SMS editors have drop-down "Personalize" menus to help you insert variable tags with just a few clicks.

Variable tags can be used in the subject line, preheader, or body of an email or custom code email or in the body content of an SMS message or landing page. 

• Contact properties
• Account properties
• Partner account properties
• Compliance properties
• Conditional statements

Design tip: Not all properties are available in our SMS editor or landing page editor drop-down menus. SMS messages are only compatible with select contact property variable tags, and Landing pages are only compatible with the account property variable tags.

Contact properties

Contact properties are pulled from your contact records and show information unique to each individual contact. When inserting variable tags in the subject line of an email, be sure to include the fallback text statements. Otherwise, you'll receive a "Make sure you are not missing a part of your subject line personalization" error message.

When you preview your email or send a test, the contact detail displays the personal information you provided for your own account, giving you an idea of what your contacts will see.

While variables can be used within your SMS messages, they cannot be used within a URL. For example, creating an SMS with the message "Visit our website at www.mycompany.com/[[City]]" will result in an error and prevent the SMS from being sent.

Did you know? If you need to make changes to a contact's information, you can edit their contact record, and if you need to make bulk updates to multiple contacts, you can import a file with the new information, and it's added to the existing contact records.

Account properties

Account properties are unique to your organization.

Did you know? To make changes to your account properties, update the information under the Account Details tab in My Account.

Partner account properties

Constant Contact Partners can use all of the contact and account details, and can also use this additional account detail:

Compliance properties

Did you know? You can link an image in your email to your Update Profile, Unsubscribe, Privacy Policy URL, or any other link property by pasting the variable tag in the Link URL field.

Conditional statements

Variable tags can be used to specify fallback options if a contact is missing the tag information, or to give more granular instructions for a tag through if/else conditional statements.

Fallback text statements

If you add a contact detail field, you can also add fallback text or a URL to display if the contact is missing the contact detail field in their contact record. Use any of the following variations:

[[FIELD OR ""]]
[[FIELD OR "Fallback text"]]
[[FIELD or https://google.com]]
[[FIELD OR https://google.com]]

If/else statements

You can apply conditional logic to a variable tag to create branching. The IF statement is executed if the statement inside the condition is true; otherwise, the ELSE statement is executed:

IS statement syntax

[[IF FIELD IS somevalue]]
[[IF FIELD IS EMPTY]]
[[IF FIELD IS NOTEMPTY]]
 
[[ELSE]]
 
[[ENDIF]]

ISNOT statement syntax

[[IF COUNTRYNAME ISNOT "USA"]]...[[ENDIF]]
 
[[IF COUNTRYNAME ISNOT "USA"]]
  ...
[[ELSE]]
  ...
[[ENDIF]]

Questions?