Random idea: Using nicknames in your emails

Yesterday I discovered a funky little Liquid trick – using the fallback filter “default” for multiple fallbacks. So why not try it on the first bit of personalisation everyone does: the greeting.

Hi {{subscriber.nick_name | default: subscriber.first_name | default: "there"}}

Now we can add a nick_name custom field to our greeting, with fallbacks if they don’t have a nickname set.

If you know your subscriber well enough and have the time, you could manually set your subscribers nick_name field, but how do you automatically set a nickname when someone joins your list?

This example shows how I do it from the one spot in Drip:

I have two triggers: One for newly created subscribers and another that you can run on existing subs to populate their nick_name field.

Here is the unminified source for the custom field.

Please go through the names and add/edit/remove/check names.

The first name per line (in the unminified source) is the lookup name; the second name is the nickname associated with the lookup name.

Cheers! Let me know if you use it 😊

p.s. I would use this sparingly, as people may not love you calling them by a nick name 😄