How to Use SMS Personalization

  • Updated

SMS Personalization lets you insert merge fields in a message - First Name, Company, account owner, anything in your contact data - with a twist specific to SMS: you define a Max length and Fallback text, so a long value cannot blow your message past 160 characters. This article explains the pattern and walks through inserting a personalization.

Who does this: Anyone composing an SMS where a merge field would lift the message
Time needed: 1-2 minutes per field
Why this matters: In email, an eight-character name versus a twenty-character one barely moves the layout. In SMS, a single long field can tip a 160-character message over the limit and double your Credit cost per recipient. Max length plus Fallback text keeps the message size predictable and your Credit spend honest.
In plain English: Pick a field, set the most characters you will let it take, and write a safe fallback for anyone whose value exceeds that cap or is missing.

How Max length and Fallback text work together

Max length is the maximum number of characters a personalization is allowed to reach before the Fallback text is used instead. The Fallback text itself cannot exceed the Max length.

A recipient receives the Fallback text if either:

  • Their value for that field exceeds the Max length, or
  • They have no data for that field.

Example:

  • Field: First Name
  • Max length: 6
  • Fallback text: friend

George (6 characters) fits and receives a message with his name. Stephanie (9 characters) exceeds the Max length and receives "friend" instead. The message length never crosses 160.

Insert a personalization

  1. When composing an SMS, click the Personalization icon Personalization icon.
  2. Select a Personalization field type: Recipient List Field or Sender Field.
  3. Choose a field from the dropdown.
  4. Enter a Max length and the Fallback text.
  5. Click Select.

Act-On inserts a personalization variable into your message in the format {{={{First Name(6)}}|friend}}. Do not change the content between the brackets.

Once inserted, Act-On reserves the number of characters equal to Max length in the composer's character count. That means the count is always greater than or equal to what any single recipient will actually receive.

Personalization being inserted

Preview personalization

By default, a personalized field shows in the message preview as a placeholder equal to the Max length - for example (XXXX).

To preview with real data, pick a recipient from the dropdown in the preview window. The preview re-renders with that recipient's values.

Personalization preview with recipient dropdown

Next steps

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