Using offers in email and SMS
The smart tag route, where you decide exactly what every recipient sees.
A smart tag is a placeholder you put in a template which is replaced with real text when the message is sent. Offers have their own set of tags, and because one brand can have many offers, an offer tag has to name which offer it means.
The template builder writes the tag for you, so you never type one by hand.
Before You Begin
-
An offer whose status is
Done, with finished copy - An email template to put the tag into
Steps
Open a template and find the smart tag panel
In the email template builder, the Available {smart_tags} panel sits to the right of the body. It lists every tag you can use, grouped by what it refers to — contacts, members, appointments, testimonials, offers and more.
Open the Offers group. It is marked as needing a record, because a tag for an offer is meaningless until it says which offer.
Choose the field you want
The Offers group lists what you can insert:
- Offer Name — the internal name. Rarely what you want in a customer-facing message.
- Offer Headline — the headline as it stands on the offer record.
- Offer Headline (finished copy) — the enhanced headline.
- Offer Description — what the customer gets.
- Offer Terms — the conditions.
- Offer Instructions — how to claim it.
For most messages the description, terms and instructions are the three that matter.
Pick the offer
Clicking a tag opens a record picker listing your finished offers by name, with their headlines beneath. There is a search box if you have many.
Choose the offer. The complete tag — the field plus that offer's record — is copied to your clipboard.
Done appear in the picker.Paste it into the template
Put the cursor where the text should appear and paste. The tag shows as a placeholder while you are editing; it becomes the real text when the message is sent.
Write around it as you would around any sentence. A tag for the terms dropped into the middle of a paragraph reads badly — give it its own line or its own paragraph.
Save the template and send as usual
Nothing more is needed. The tag is filled in at send time, whether the message goes out as a one-off, as part of a sequence, as a broadcast, or as an SMS.
Result
Every recipient of that template sees the offer's current wording.
Because the tag names the offer by record rather than by name, renaming the offer never breaks the template. And because the text is read at send time, editing the offer updates every template that references it, with nothing to republish.
Warning: The three body tags — description, terms and instructions — read the finished copy. An offer created without the enhancement has none, so those tags come back empty and the message goes out with a gap where the offer should be. Make sure the offer is genuinely finished before you reference it, and send yourself a test.
Troubleshooting
The offer has no finished copy for that field. Open the offer: if it says it has not been enhanced, write the four fields yourself and save, then send another test.
The picker lists offers marked Done. An offer at Draft or Enhancing is not there yet. Check its status on the Offers list.
The tag was altered after it was pasted, or typed by hand. Delete it and insert a fresh one from the panel rather than correcting it in place.
There is no tag for a code, because no per-contact code is issued. If the offer uses a single fixed code, type it into the template. Otherwise state how to claim the offer and leave the code to whatever system honours it.
