How do I personalize my newsletters to my audience members?

Letterhead lets you personalize your newsletters with subscriber-specific details using personalization tags (also called merge tags), such as {{ firstName }}.

For example, writing Hi {{ firstName }}, in your newsletter automatically displays each subscriber’s first name when they receive it. See the complete list of personalization tags for what’s available.

Use merge tags in subject lines too

Merge tags work in the Email Subject field as well as the body. For example:

Hey {{ firstName }}, Don't Miss Out on This Week's Updates!

Each recipient sees their own name in the subject line — a simple way to boost opens.

Set a default value

Add a fallback so your message still reads well when subscriber data is missing:

{{ firstName or 'Subscriber' }}

This shows the subscriber’s first name when available, and “Subscriber” when it isn’t.

Merge tags appear as chips while you write

In a newsletter’s text blocks, a merge tag turns into a chip — a single rounded label showing the tag’s name — the moment you close it with }}. A tag you are partway through typing stays as ordinary text until then, so nothing changes shape under you mid-word.

Chips live in the editor only. What you save, and what your subscribers receive, is exactly the tag you typed.

A few things worth knowing:

• A chip behaves as one character. A single press of Backspace removes the whole tag instead of nibbling it away a letter at a time.
• Reopening a draft shows your tags as chips again, including tags you wrote before.
• Anything tag-shape becomes a chip, whether or not Letterhead recognises the name inside it. A chip is not a promise the tag will fill in — it only means you wrote something in the right shape. Whether a tag actually resolves is still checked when you save or preview, as below.
• Tags inside a link’s web address stay as plain text. An unsubscribe link or a tracking URL that carries a tag keeps working exactly as it did.

When a merge tag is invalid

If a merge tag can’t be read — a typo, an unclosed {{ … }}, or a field name that doesn’t exist — saving or previewing your newsletter highlights the specific block that contains the bad tag, so you can go straight to it and fix the tag instead of hunting through your whole newsletter for it.

Personalizing when you send through Braze

If your channel sends through Braze, you have a second way to personalize a newsletter: pick a real field from your connected Braze workspace, instead of using the merge tags above.

This capability isn’t available to any customer yet. The steps below describe how it’s built to work — once it ships to at least some customers, a person should verify them against the live app and remove this note.

Braze doesn’t check anything you type into a newsletter by hand — a mistyped field name, or a field your data team has since renamed, ships silently and reaches a reader’s inbox as a blank space or a literal {{ }}. The Personalize picker only lets you choose from the custom attributes your connected Braze workspace actually holds, so whatever you pick is guaranteed to be real. Look for it:

• In the body editor, on any text block.
• Next to the Email Subject field, labeled Personalize subject line.
• Next to the preview text field, labeled Personalize preview text.

Search or browse the custom attributes your workspace holds — each shown with its data type, such as a text field like first_name or a number field like loyalty_points — pick one, and set a fallback value. This step is required: Braze renders nothing at all for a reader who doesn’t have that field set, so without a fallback a greeting like “Hi ,” could reach someone’s inbox. The picker inserts the field and your fallback together; once inserted, it reads and behaves like any other text in your newsletter.

This is separate from the merge tags described above, which are for newsletters sent through Letterhead’s own native sending rather than an external ESP like Braze — there’s nothing to set up in Braze first.

Testing note

Personalization tags do not populate in test emails — they only fill in with real subscriber data once the letter is published and sent to your audience.

You collect the data behind these tags through your audience profile fields — see What are audience profile fields in Letterhead? For everything else you can do with your editions, see Working in Emails.