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 the moment you close it with }}. A chip is a single, lightly shaded label with a small {{ }} mark in front, showing the tag’s name and its default value if you gave it one. A tag you are partway through typing stays as ordinary text until then, so nothing changes shape under you mid-word.

The chip shows your default value, so you can see it’s still there: {{ firstName or "Reader" }} shows as firstName or Reader, and {{ email }} shows as email. A very long default is shortened on the chip, but the whole default is still saved.

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-shaped 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.

Style a merge tag

You can style a merge tag the same way as the words around it, and your readers see that styling in their inbox, with their own details in its place.

1. Click the chip’s label. The whole chip is selected, its shading darkens, and the formatting toolbar opens beside it.
2. Pick any style the toolbar offers, such as bold, italic, underline or a text colour (and a font or size, in blocks that have them). The style applies to the whole tag at once, so a tag can’t end up half bold.

A chip shows your styling directly: a bold red tag looks bold and red while you write.

Styling also carries over in two other ways:

• Typing a tag inside styled text keeps the style. Write {{ firstName }} in the middle of a bold, coloured sentence and the chip comes out bold and coloured too.
• A tag that replaces selected text keeps that text’s style. Select a styled word and insert a tag in its place, and the tag takes the word’s style.

Clicking just to the left or right of a chip places your cursor beside it, so you can keep typing next to a tag without selecting it.

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 can type merge tags by hand using Braze custom attributes — for example, {{ first_name }} or {{ loyalty_points }}. Type a field name carefully: Braze doesn’t check it until send time, so 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 {{ }}.

This is separate from newsletters sent through Letterhead’s own native sending, which use the merge tags described above — 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.