So, the other day I answered a question in one of the Infusionsoft Facebook Groups. I have a rule: If I answer a question three times, I create a resource for the fourth time. So, that’s where the idea for this blog post came from (Thanks for the question Tracey!).

Basically Merge Fields are the key to personalizing your marketing messaging. If you’ve used Infusionsoft for any amount of time you’ve probably learned that you can use ~Contact.FirstName~ when you want the system to add their first name to the message, right?

Well, there are a few other less known merge fields that I want to shine a light with the hopes that it will make your life easier.

Hosted Email Link

Anyway, the question from last week was essentially “How can I add a link to the hosted version of an email if I’m using the new mobile responsive email builder?”

Well, the answer is fairly simple: Any time you want to add a link to the hosted version of an email, you can do it by using the following merge field: ~HostedEmail.Link~

Now, I recognize that there are plenty of businesses who will never need that particular merge field because they don’t use the hosted version of their emails for anything, but maybe one of these next ones will save the day sometime.

Update: Infusionsoft has officially “sunset” the Hosted Email merge field. Here’s an article with the details.

Date Merge Fields

Did you know that you can merge details about the current date into emails? Here are the fields:

~Date.Current~ – Month DD, YYYY

~Date.DayOfWeek~ – What day of the week it is (i.e. Monday)

~Date.DayOfMonth~ – What day of the month it is (i.e. 20)

~Date.Month~ – The name of the month we are in (i.e. February)

~Date.MonthOfYear~ – What number month we are in (i.e. 2)

~Date.Year~ – The current year (i.e. 2017)

You guys, the more personal an email is, the more it will resonate with your audience. Using date merge fields means you can say things like “Hope June was a good month for your business!”, “Good luck closing out 2017!” and “Enjoy the rest of your Monday!”, and you can rest easy knowing that whenever that info goes out, it will be accurate.

Disclaimer: The date merge fields use Eastern US Time – and I haven’t found a way to change that. So, for folks on the other side of the international date line this means that sometimes the date merged in would be yesterday; which is…annoying. Just proceed with caution, test thoroughly, and check out these date modifiers which might save the day.

Contact Record Link

Picture this: You’ve built a fancy campaign and it’s movin’ and groovin’, saving you time and growing your biz. All good. Well, now let’s say that there’s a point in the campaign where you wanna get real fancy, and automatically send an email to yourself, or another staff member. This can be useful for prompting yourself to check on something, triggering reminders to other people, or any other number of circumstances. Well, to take those useful reminders to a whole new level, there’s a merge field that you can include to automatically open the contact record that needs attention. Here’s the merge field: ~Contact.EditPage~

(Shout out to Brian Keith, among others who have also documented this bad boy.)

Bonus Secret: HTML User Signatures

Some Infusionsoft users need more flexibility than the built in user signature offer, so they opt for the HTML route instead. The merge field for adding the HTML version of the owner’s signature is: ~Owner.HTMLSignature~

However, there are situations where you may want to be able to merge the signature of a user other than the contact’s owner. You can do that by using ~User_ID.HTMLSignature~ and replace the “ID” with the user ID number.

That’s it for today’s post, if you have a favorite “secret” feature of Infusionsoft, I’d love to hear about it!

12 Comments

Eric Sparrow on February 20, 2017 at 7:43 am

This is great info, Greg! Especially that Contact Record Link at the end. We find that to REALLY personalize our automation, we send our sales staff an occasional email to remind them to check up on a customer. Having a link to that contact record ensures that they have the data right in front of them when making the call!

Cheers on another well-written post!
- Greg Jenkins on February 20, 2017 at 9:36 am
  
  Thanks E-bird! Appreciate the love – you just keep pourin’ those candles, and I’ll keep burnin’ em.
Nick Liberati on February 20, 2017 at 9:26 am

Great stuff Greg, as always.
- Greg Jenkins on February 20, 2017 at 9:36 am
  
  Thanks Nick! Appreciate the feedback.
Martha Bowers on February 22, 2017 at 11:09 am

Thanks for all information that you share… priceless!
- Greg Jenkins on February 22, 2017 at 12:12 pm
  
  Appreciate that Martha! Thanks for reading.
Brett on February 24, 2017 at 8:53 am

~Contact.EditPage~

Wut. :O
- Greg Jenkins on February 24, 2017 at 11:25 am
  
  News to you?
  - Brett R Fairbourn on February 24, 2017 at 1:49 pm
    
    Haha… just got your message. Now I feel ashamed. But mostly excited. Not sure how I missed this, but I did! Yes, this is news to me. Very good news!
    - Greg Jenkins on February 26, 2017 at 10:22 pm
      
      No no no, no shame intended. I’m pumped anytime I get to teach anyone something new!
Liam on March 16, 2017 at 1:40 am

Sorry, this is just another reason I hate the new email builder. What is the logic behind leaving some tools secret?

I just thank god I’m not forced to use it in my own application but unfortunately the one we are sponsoring for a charity has no other choice (facepalm)

Great tips by the way
- Greg Jenkins on March 16, 2017 at 10:13 am
  
  Liam, first of all, thanks for reading. Now, you’re totally entitled to feel however you like, but I think your frustrations are misguided. Unless I’m missing something, this post has nothing to do with the new email builder. These “secret” merge fields are available for use in the legacy builder, and in the new builder. And with the exception of the date fields, they’re not documented in either. (The date fields are accessible in both.)
  
  Now, “Why” aren’t they documented, that’s a different question. But you’d have to ask Infusionsoft. The whole reason I wrote this blog post was to shed light on them in case people found them useful!