Better Marketing with Handlebars Merge Language for Pardot
It’s every email marketer’s nightmare. An email campaign goes out and the merge tags don’t carry over as intended. This can happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is because of poor data quality and bad data entry habits on the part of the team. This can certainly be frustrating, especially as the solution is a time consuming data cleanse. Alternatively, the cause may just be insufficient complexity in the merge language.
Well, if you are using Pardot for your marketing efforts, you will now be able to upgrade your merge language to “Handlebars Merge Language” and make better and more personalized emails.
How exactly does HML improve your ability to write emails? In a nutshell, it provides the ability to write “IF” statements. IF statements allow you to specify specific conditions to display content a certain way if the relevant field has dat, and then for that string of content to display completely different if that field has no data.
Previously, Pardot merge tags would simply give you the option to have the data fields populate from Salesforce, and if that field is empty, you would have to write a generic entry to fill that gap. The most common example is “Hey %%first name%%”, with a backup value of “there” for the field. So you would either get the result of “Hey John”, or “Hey there”. It works, but it certainly isn’t very personal or flexible.
With the new HML tags though, you can set up so that the first result would be the same, “Hey John”, but if the first name isn’t known, you can make the whole string completely different, such as, “To whom it may concern” or if you want to have some fun “Hello you beautiful person”.
Click here for more details and examples of how HML tags will work in Pardot.
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
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CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.