Replacement Variables

For simple personalization of emails, you will often want to pass in dynamic content in replacement variables (often called vars for short).

Replacement variables are placed inside {curlybraces} and may not contain spaces or any characters besides letters, numbers, and underscores.

For example, you might open an email with a salutation:

Dear {name},

{name} will be replaced with the appropriate content for the user.

You can pass replacement variables in the following ways:

• They can be set for a particular user using the email API call. All messages sent to that email address (both transactional and campaign emails) will be able to use the same replacement variable.
• They can be passed for a particular transactional message using the send API call.
• A campaign email can pull variables that will apply to the entire mailing using a Data Feed.

Replacement variables can be placed in the following parts of your email:

• From Name
• Subject
• HTML Content
• Text Content

Replacement variables are actually just the simplest form of a powerful and sophisticated template syntax that you can use for extreme personalization of emails, including functions, loops, and conditionals. For more on this topic, see: Syntax.