About Personalization

Use personalization to customize messages with user-specific data, ensuring timely and relevant content for each audience member.

Personalizing content

To personalize content in Airship, create a merge field representing a value you want to personalize, surrounded by double curly braces, e.g., {{firstname}}. Airship replaces the merge field (and braces) with the data specified by the merge field at send time — just like mail merge in a word processor or mail client.

Common uses of personalization:

  • Flight info“Your departure gate for flight {{flight_number}} has changed to {{gate_code}}.”

  • Retail purchase updates"{{first_name}}, we received your order {{order_number}} and will send tracking information when it has shipped."

  • Membership rewards program updates“You reached {{program_level}} status and have been awarded {{points}} bonus points!”

In the image below you can see {{program_level}} and {{points}} appear as Platinum and 1500 in the message preview. See also: Previewing personalized content.

Handlebars syntax

Airship’s personalization features are implemented using the Handlebars templating language. We do not support all features described in handlebarsjs.com, only those described in our Handlebars reference documentation. It includes information about complex expressions that use logic operations such as AND, OR, NOT, greater than/less than, loops, math, and more.

Data sources

The data you use to personalize a message may be personal in nature (first name, birth date, city) or based on user behavior (purchase history, pageviews, app opens). That data can come from these sources:

Evaluation order

You can use multiple data sources to personalize a single piece of content, which means it is possible for you to have two merge fields with the same name in the same expression, e.g., an attribute {{points}} and an inline list value for {{points}}.

If two fields share the same name, Airship attempts to use the value that is most relevant to your audience. This order isn’t guaranteed, but, in general, Airship attempts to use the following order:

  1. Custom event properties
  2. Inline list values
  3. Attributes
  4. External data feeds and Coupons feeds

You are advised to make sure your fields have unique names to prevent unintended personalization results.

What you can personalize

When creating a message, you can personalize:

You can also personalize reusable content:

Start personalizing

First learn personalization formatting:

Then you can start personalizing your messages, templates, and snippets.