Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's what in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

We recently highlighted Salsa's tools for personalizing thank-you pages with the name of your donor or supporter after s/he takes action.

Today, we're going to translate that same trick to the automated Email Triggers your action pages launch.

Personalized Email Triggers

I hope you're already using Email Triggers widely to thank your supporters when they join, give, register, or take action on your Salsa pages.

When someone likes you that much, why settle for "Dear Supporter"? Personalized greetings like "Dear Adam" show the recipient that you care.

Including Merge Fields in Triggers

Merge fields like [[First_Name]] and (for donation pages) [[amount]] can be added right to the text of your Email Trigger content

• In the subject line;
• In the HTML content;
• In the text content;
• Or all three!

What Merge Fields Are Available?

Trigger merge fields come not from the saved Salsa database but from the page that activates the Trigger, so they can only merge data generated on that page. For a Trigger to use [[First_Name]], it has to be sent from a page that solicits First Name.

So how do you know what fields are available for merging?

There are two choices:

• Reference this list of frequently used merge fields (that's the easy way);
• Make the page that's going to activate the Trigger tell you its merge fields by using Append Available Values, under the Options tab (a bit harder, but comprehensive).

Here's the Result

One or two well-placed merge fields really brighten an automated response email.

Take advantage of this tip to get your donor thank-yous and receipts shipshape (like this example) for the holiday fundraising rush.

As always, I'd love to hear about your experiences with this (or any) Salsa tool -- drop me a line at feedback@salsalabs.com with any comments.