How to Personalise Messages with Placeholders
Placeholders are great for adding a personal touch to your SMS text messages. They may also be known as merge tags or merge fields.
Setting Up Your Contact List
In this example, you want to send a message to a list of clients to remind them to pay their outstanding invoices. You want to not only address the client by name, but mention the invoice number and amount owing in each message as well.
Once you have your database ensure you have included name, contact number, invoice number and invoice amount, in the form of a spreadsheet with labelled columns. It may look like this:
Then within the ClickSend dashboard, as you import your contacts from your database, in the form of a CSV file, you'll be prompted to match your column names with our standard placeholders. Ensure that you choose match first name, last name and contact number with their corresponding columns. For Invoice Number and Invoice amount, choose Custom String 1 and Custom String 2.
Adding Placeholders To Your Message
When crafting your text message, determine where you would like your custom information to be placed. For example:
Hi Jack, invoice number A1341133 is now due. Please pay the amount of $698 owing as soon as possible. Thank you.
Note where Jack, A1341133 and $698 and swap them out with (First Name), (Cust. 1) and (Cust. 2) respectively:
If done correctly, on the send preview screen you will see the data pulled through from the first row of your database.
If you're having trouble setting up your placeholders, ensure you are not manually adding the information in each field. The placeholder relies on the fields of the contact list. It will not pull any details if you manually enter the number.
If you still have any questions about our placeholders, please reach out to one of our friendly customer support team members with our 24/7 live chat.