Lesson 03 · 6 min 6 min

Templates and variables

Real personalization, and the placeholder rule.

In development. Telephony is complete, but turning it on is not immediate: registering your number with the US carriers is a regulated filing measured in weeks. Lessons 05 and 06 explain it before you start.

A campaign is one email that goes to many people at once, each with their own name on it. The Communications module is where you build it, and it is on the Professional plan and up.

Recipients first, copy second

You choose who it goes to with filters — or by hand, picking specific leads or agents — and the screen shows you the resulting list with a count before you write a word. That number is the only way to notice that "all buyers" is four people, or that it is twelve hundred.

The variables

In the body you can write placeholders that get substituted person by person. Campaigns have two: the name of whoever receives it and the name of whoever signs it. Several spellings are accepted, because anyone writing in two different places ends up mixing vocabularies.

The placeholder rule

A placeholder never reaches a client. If a value cannot be substituted — the contact has no name, the field is misspelled — the platform deletes the placeholder and sends the sentence with the gap. It does not send the braces.

That is deliberate, and it is worth understanding why. Reading "Hi {{recipient_name}}" in an email is the clearest signal there is that a badly configured robot is behind it; a sentence that opens with "Hi," just reads like a sentence. The platform prefers the gap, and logs which one failed so it can be fixed.

Three vocabularies that do not mix

This saves half an hour of confusion. Three different sets of placeholders live in the platform and each one only works in its own place:

  • Email campaigns use Spanish-language names, for the recipient and for the sender.
  • Workflow plans use dotted English names, in the style of "contact.first_name".
  • WhatsApp templates use numbers — one, two — because Meta imposes it, not because we chose it.

Copying a body from one place to another is the usual cause of gaps where a name should be. If you reuse text, check the placeholders.

Signature, attachments and opting out

  • The footer comes in three shapes: a formal one with your details, one with your photo and the agency logo, and a minimal one with name and email. Whatever is missing is left out without leaving holes.
  • You can attach files: up to 5 MB each and 10 MB in total, and up to 2 MB per image embedded in the body.
  • Every campaign carries its own unsubscribe link, different for each recipient. Anyone who opts out stops receiving campaigns, and there is a way back if they later want one.
Tip: Opting out is not red tape: it is what keeps your domain off spam lists. A campaign with no clean exit ends up costing you your work email, not just your marketing.