Intro to Variables¶

Article Description: Use variables to personalise flows for your customers & save time

Let’s start with an example, you want to broadcast to your customers, but want to personalise it with at least their name.

So instead of saying just: “Hi there, we’re running a 20% sale — limited time offer”, we’d want to say “Hi Robin, we’ve 20% on selected products — only for you!”

The second option would have a lot more appeal to the end customer, since it seems targeted directly to them. We obviously don’t want to create a 1000 different flows for each customer, that’d be a waste of time for all of us! Instead, we achieve this using variables in message flows. Let’s see how:

1. Create a message flow. Not sure how to? See our quick 5 minute guide here

2. Once we have a message node, let’s start editing

   

3. As we start typing out, place a curly brace ({) where you’d like to place the customer’s name, and immediately you’ll see a dropdown open. This dropdown will show you all the variables you can use

   

4. At the top of the list, you’ll see “contact name” — that’s the variable for the name of the contact this message will be sent to. Click the down arrow on your system to highlight this & press enter to add it to your text

5. Voila! The variable has been added to the message. Now, whoever receives this message will see their own name being sent. A space will have automatically been added after the variable — you can start typing the rest of the message

   

   

6. Let’s try sending this message to a customer now, you can do so in many ways:

   1. Inbox, keyword reply, broadcast
      1. Ensure your message is set as the starting message to do this!
   2. A trigger or following from another node, right inside message flows

7. We’ll send this via Inbox by pressing the / key. And as you can see below, the name got replaced with the contact’s name (which was set as “AD”)

   

   

And there you have it — a simple & effective way to reduce toil and personalise your flows!