Personalise emails with conditional content using liquid

You can personalise your emails and generate content for recipients based on the data you hold in Movement using liquid. Whether it’s showing a message to regular donors, changing copy based on supporters location or action history, using liquid in Movement means your messaging will be personalised according to individual data. 

Liquid is a simple, template based programming language that’s enabled in all Movement email content (headers, body and footers) and on Pages, so you can personalise and use conditional content across your comms.

This article gives an overview of how to use liquid to do basic personalisation and conditional content. Our developer guide contains more examples of liquid code you can copy for use in Movement as well as details on the merge tags available for use: 

• Liquid overview and merge tags: https://developers.yourmovement.org/docs/liquid-formatting

• Liquid using donation data: https://developers.yourmovement.org/docs/using-donations-data-in-emails 

Show supporter’s data and activity with liquid 

Liquid uses merge tags as placeholders in your email or page copy for the real data held on an individual on Movement. You can use merge tags to pull through and display the data you hold on supporters and members as well as activity data collected by Movement.

For example you can use merge tags to pull through supporter activity to show them everything they’ve done in an end of year email or show donation data to acknowledge donations made so far:

Show conditional content using liquid.

As well as showing data you hold, you can use this data to determine the copy shown to supporters by adding conditional logic with  Liquid’s ‘if’, ‘elseif’ and ‘else’ statements. 

This allows you to display or hide content based on merge tag values. So you can set copy for donors vs non-donors, or for those who have taken previous action on the issue - anything you have the data for. 

Liquid’s ‘if’, ‘elseif’ and ‘else’ statements work by showing the specified copy *if* the conditions set are met, or else the copy if they meet the conditions for the next *else if*. If they meet none of the conditions specified the *else* copy will be shown.

For example, you could apply the following logic to identify donors versus non-donors and show them different copy accordingly. This way you can use liquid conditional copy to adjust your messaging, replacing the need to segment audiences and build separate campaigns for different supporter groups: 

Liquid in Movement

We have pooled lots of examples together for both for donations and general supporter information, which you can easily copy and paste directly into your email content to edit and build from. 

Use case examples

Here are some simple use case examples in plain language, to give some food for thought on how you might utilise Liquid. You can copy and paste the Liquid code for all of these examples and more from our developer docs here. 

• Recognise supporters to build community: Simply say thank you to supporters for their most recent donation to foster a sense of belonging and build community, making your supporters more likely to engage and perhaps donate again in the future. Just use: {{donations.previous_amount}}
  
  

• Turn one off donors into regular donors: Thank one off donors for their average gift and ask if they would consider making a regular donation using: {{donations.average}}
  
  

• Encourage one off donors to donate higher amounts: Demonstrate the impact of a one off donors highest donation by detailing what impact that donation had and what it helped you to achieve using: {{donations.highest}}
  
  

• Re-engage lapsed regular donors and attract new donors: Remind regular donors of their past contributions and the impact they had and ask if they would consider giving regularly again - no need to exclude those who haven't previously donated, as you can have an 'else' option to promote your fundraising message: 

{% assign regular_donor = donations.regular_donations | has: "status", "active" %}

{% assign cancelled_regular_donor = donations.regular_donations | has: "status", "cancelled" %}

{% if cancelled_regular_donor == true and regular_donor == false %}

  You used to be a regular donor, would you consider resubscribing?

{else} We don't have big funders, so we rely on small donations from supporters like you. {%endif}

Build smarter journeys with Automations
With Movement, you can use our Automations feature to create smooth, automated journeys to manage your comms. This means you can spend more time doing the things that matter. We have guidance on how to create and manage Automations here. Combining Automated campaigns with Liquid can have a big impact. 

For example, you might want to set up an Automation for thank you emails with personalised donation amounts triggered when someone contributes. You could also consider an Automation which emails lapsed donors after a certain amount of time, reminding them of their previous contributions and asking if they’d like to give regularly again. 

There’s lots of scope to get creative here!