OptinMonster: Smart Tag in the context of personalized content

Last Updated on December 21, 2022 by Admin

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What is Smart Tag?

While sending mass emails, we know that by mail merge feature, we can attach personalized content such as name of a person after Hello for each receiver. Smart Tag is an OptinMonster feature (available with Pro or higher plan) which too offers customized content to your website visitors based on variables like gender, name, location, day of the week.

So, you can greet your visitors in a number of personalized ways such as based on their city of residence. In other words, Smart Tag adds unique dynamic text to a campaign to each visitor based on the data (name, gender, email, phone, location, past purchased products, and so on) stored about them.

Smart Tag Format

Start and end with 2 curly braces.
The first value should be either a predefined smart tag or the name of a custom variable you have defined.

{{SMART_TAG_NAME}}

You can optionally use a pipe character (|) followed by text to use as the default in the event that the tag information cannot be found.

{{SMART_TAG_NAME|DEFAULT_TEXT}}

How to add Smart Tags?

In the Campaign Builder, add or edit a text element.

To ease the process, there are already a number of predefined Smart Tag. Select the { } curly braces button to choose a predefined Smart Tag.

Choose the one by clicking and the same will be added to the text field editor.

You have an option to add a default value in case the Smart Tag cannot find the relevant information. For instance, you can set a customized message as “Hello, Mr. X, how are you doing today!” And in case the Smart Tag cannot find name (might be only email id is known for the user as the form submitted by him or her included only email id), message displayed can be, “Hello, how are you doing today!”

Once completed, press Save button. Smart Tag will now be replaced with the dynamic value once the campaign is set live.

Custom Smart Tags

For advanced users/developers, there is Custom Smart Tags defined by you and contain any particular type of data you want. 

There are three ways Custom Smart Tags can be defined:

1. Query Argument: Using query arguments to define your custom smart tags. To target a custom tag called “name” you can add a query argument to your URL, like https://yourwebsite.com/?name=Thomas (defined a query argument with the key of fname and the value of Thomas). OptinMonster will inspect this URL and if it finds a match, it will replace the Smart Tag with the value of query argument.
2. Cookie: Similar to query arguments, OptinMonster will search for a cookie named fname and replace the Smart Tag with the value of the cookie.
3. Javascript Variable: Make use of OptinMonster’s Javascript API. Dtr object will give access to Smart Tags Methods.

Suppose you have a special offer for subscribers. You can send them a link which when clicked will take to your website and a popup or welcome gate will show that will greet subscribers by their name.

Suppose you decide to address subscribers by first name. In case name not available, then ‘Hey there!’.

Add {{form_first_name}} merge field to the popup, by clicking on the merge field button and selecting {{form_first_name}} from the dropdown:

Define the “name” variable. Add the subscriber’s first name to the URL as a query argument. For instance: https://yourwebsite.com/?name=Thomas.

Adding this URL manually to each individual email is not a practical thing to suggest at a time when automation is the way forward. Email providers today use merge tags to insert variables, like a first name.

Use merge tags when adding the link in your email. For example, if you use ConvertKit, their first name merge tag is {{ subscriber.first_name }}. So when drafting your email in ConvertKit, your link would look something like this:

https://yourwebsite.com/?name={{ subscriber.first_name }}

Moosend, which we ourselves use, has this tutorial to refer: What is a personalization tag and how can I use it?

When the campaign loads on the page, the text will show the customer’s name:

When the name not available, here is the output (Hey there):

Way forward with learning

To know elaborately about OptinMonster’s Smart Tags including Predefined Smart Tags and Custom Smart Tags, refer How to Use Smart Tags in OptinMonster.

For learning about WordPress per se, apart from the official site WordPress.org with its workshops and lesson plans, forums, consider WPBeginner. To learn all about digital marketing, you get free access to OptinMonster University with any of the paid OptinMonster plans. Just to reiterate that OptinMonster works on all popular web platforms and not just WordPress.

Are you someone comfortable working on WordPress with its plugins and themes but intend to build your skill on programming/coding part as well? So that you can work comfortably developing customized web applications with Javascript! Here is the free resource to learn the essentials of the JavaScript programming language to advance your skills in the lucrative field of web development.