Personalizing messages using variables

Automatically add your customer's name, company, fallbacks and more to your message.

Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated over a week ago

You can add variables to your in-app messages and emails to make them far more engaging and effective. Just click the icon on the right of the text block on the composer.

Here are some useful examples:

First name

You can greet each user by their first name. We'll automatically add this at the beginning of each message for you, because it's best practice. It's easy to remove it if you don't need it.

Company name

Or you could add the company name. If you’re looking for feedback about your product, for example, we recommend addressing the company by their first name. They’re more likely to respond to a personal message sent to a select number of companies, than an impersonal message sent to everyone.  

Note: If a user is a member of multiple companies, messages using company name will be sent to them once for each company.

Add custom attributes and events

You can even include custom attributes or events in your message, so that the information displayed is specific to each user. Maybe that’s the number of songs a user has created, the number of teammates they’ve added or the number of times they’ve logged into your product. This is a great way to let customers know that they’re about to reach a limit.

Or you can display their achievements and celebrate their progress. For example, displaying the number of projects a user has created might spur them on to achieve even more success.

Fallbacks

A lot of the time it's a good idea to replace the fallback variable with another word, in case the information is not available for a particular user. For example, if you add "Hi <first name>" at the beginning of your message and use the fall back as "there", it will say "Hi John" if we know John's name but it will say "Hi there" if we don't.

Just click any variable you’ve added, and you’ll be able to include a fallback.

Note: If you send Intercom an attribute to include in a link, we'll take care of the encoding.


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