Highly dynamic (multiple variable) emails

Ryan Hagg

We are prototyping a custom newsletter with five unique paragraphs depending on someone's affiliations. That is to say if someone has an undergrad degree in Biology, a grad degree in Engineering, went to a Public Health event and donated to Medicine they would get those four paragraphs and a general. In essence each newsletter that went out the door could be unique (assuming we have content). Does anyone have any experience doing an email that could conceivably have 18 if statements for each of the five paragraphs? Is there an easier way? Is it worth our time? We are not using Convio for donations or events so the information will be gathered from our non-Convio data source and then uploaded somehow......

Thank you.

Andrew Hedden

Hey Ryan,

It is possible to do messages like this.

The basic process is as follows:

1. setup the groups in Convio

2. upload the constituent data from your offline source and assign the members to the appropriate group

3. create your message with conditional content depending on group membership. The s tag documentation available at should have the information that you need to test group membership.

4. test your message using a review audience to make sure the conditional content is rendered as expected, be sure to have a record in the review audience that are part of each group you are using in the message.

5. send your message

Some things to keep in mind: you will likely want to develop the message well ahead of time, conditionals can get tricky quickly. Keep in mind if there are people who overlap memberships between the groups that you are creating conditionals. If you keep the membership between groups mutually exclusive it will limit the testing you will need to do. Lastly the more conditionals and personalization the longer it will take to process the messages for sending so put some thought into when you send the message if you are sending time sensitive information.

There are several different ways to do this so don't think that this is the only way to accomplish your goal!

-Andrew