How To Modify Personalization Tags in ActiveCampaign

How To Modify Personalization Tags in ActiveCampaign

In this video, I want to share a quick tip about how you can modify a personalization tag to for example uppercase, lowercase, or title case.

I’ll show you what it is, how you can use it and will show you a handy example to make sure the contact’s first name is displayed properly.

Why should you modify personalization tags?

Imagine someone types their first name completely in capitals inside your opt-in form 🧐

Then, if you don’t use a modifier, every time you send an email that includes their first name, it will display the name in capitals too.

Example of an email with a capitalized first name

That looks a bit weird.

But luckily, there’s an easy fix for this 🙂

How do you modify personalization tags?

Luckily, this is really easy 🙂

You first have to decide on which modifier you want to use;

  • UPPER — converts entire tag to all uppercase letters.
  • UPPERFIRST — converts first letter to uppercase.
  • UPPERWORDS — capitalizes the first letter of every word.
  • TITLECASE — capitalizes the first letter of every word, and forces all other letters to be lowercase.
  • LOWER — converts entire tag to lowercase letters.
  • LOWERFIRST — changes the first letter of the text to lowercase.
  • LOWERWORDS — changes the first letter of every word to lowercase.

So let’s say you want to display the contact’s first name in title case.

All you have to do is to add the “TITLECASE” modifier after a pipe symbol ( | ) inside the personalization tag:

%FIRSTNAME|TITLECASE%

Easy, right?

And all the other modifiers work exactly the same.

So if you would want the first name in lowercase, you would use this;

%FIRSTNAME|LOWER%

And this doesn’t just work with the first name, you can use it with all the standard personalization tags that are available

Plus, if you want, you can use this to modify custom field personalization tags too 🤓

That’s it!

Now you know how to modify personalization tags in ActiveCampaign 😄

Super easy to implement, but you just have to know that this is possible.

What do you think? 🙌

Let me know in the comments below.

I would love to hear from you 🤗

Avatar of Max van Collenburg
Max van Collenburg

I'm addicted to travel, love a good cappuccino, have two cute cats, and craft actionable content for online business owners that want to grow their business with non-sleazy marketing & automation. More weird facts about me here.

10 thoughts on “How To Modify Personalization Tags in ActiveCampaign”

  1. Avatar of Narcyz Janas

    I would like to ask you about ActiveCampaign is this good enough for ManyChat?

    • Avatar of Max van Collenburg

      I’m not sure how you want to use it, but I really like using ActiveCampaign.

  2. Avatar of Ramsis Kasis

    very good:)

    • Avatar of Max van Collenburg

      Thanks!

  3. Avatar of Nyle

    I always love your content. Very helpful. Thank you!

    • Avatar of Max van Collenburg

      Thanks Nyle! Glad you like it 😄

  4. Avatar of Kevin Willis

    How can just the current year be returned in an email?

    The personalization tag %TODAY% returns the current date (i.e. 05/05/2023)

    • Avatar of Max van Collenburg

      Hey Kevin! Unfortunately, there isn’t a native way to format the date! Would love if we could use %TODAY|YYYY%, but unfortunately that doesn’t work 🤷‍♂️

      I got around it by create a %CURRENT_YEAR% custom field, and then I populate that field by triggering a Make.com webhook in the automation that sets that custom field.

  5. Avatar of Andrew

    Is it possible to customise the output of a date field? For example, to remind someone of an anniversary, the renewal date field on the contact entry contains the day, month and year. This means the output looks like this:

    …will be subject to a new annual term that restarts from 25/07/2021

    If I want to send an email saying your annual term restarts from 25 July, do I need to add a separate text based field to render this correctly in the template?

    • Avatar of Max van Collenburg

      Hey Andrew! Unfortunately that’s not possible by default, would be a really awesome feature that I’ve also been wishing for!

      A workaround is to create a second custom field, and then have an automation run through Make.com to update the custom field with the desired format before sending out the email. Bit more complicated, but works.

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