Smart Merge Tags

  1. Overview
  2. How it works
  3. How to enable it
  4. Configuring sample content
  5. Displaying sample content during editing

Overview

Smart merge tags provide a better way for your customers to leverage personalization when creating content with BEE.

With Smart merge tags, users can:

  • quickly identify merge tags through a specific highlighting
  • see human-friendly names instead of the raw syntax – e.g., Customer Name instead of {%customer.name%}.
  • select, replace, and style merge tags with just one click
  • get sample content for each merge tag, both during editing and preview.

How it works

After enabling Smart merge tags, BEE will:

  • highlight merge tags with a dotted border
  • display the tag name you passed to BEE, instead of the raw syntax

Example of smart merge tags inside an email

When users click on a tag, its border will become solid to signify that it has been selected. After selection, users can style, replace, or delete the merge tag with just one click.

Changing the style of a smart merge tag

Smart merge tags are easier to identify inside the content you’ve created and will save users tons of time. Furthermore, hiding the syntax will make it impossible for a user to break it while interacting with the overall text element.

On top of this, you can pass to BEE sample content for each merge tag, so that users can see an example of the data that will take the place of the merge tags when the web content is rendered:

Smart merge tags with sample content

 

How to enable it

Smart merge tags are disabled by default. If your application doesn’t have Smart merge tags, you need to activate it. It takes just a few clicks:

  • Login into the developer portal
  • Click Details next to the application you want to configure
    • We recommend you first familiarize yourself with this feature under a DEV or QA application
  • Click view more under Application configuration.
  • Under the Services section, toggle Enable Smart merge tags ON and click the Save button.

Notice that, at this point, you will be prompted to enable the merge tag preview in the toolbar. You can skip this option when your integration is not using the standard toolbar or you’re not passing sample content for your merge tags.

Configuring sample content

After enabling Smart merge tags from your developer account, you need to apply a minor change to the merge tags’ initial configuration.




{
  name: 'first name',
  value: '[first-name]',
  previewValue: 'John',
}

The optional previewValue parameter is used to pass to the editor a sample content (text string) for every merge tag.

The value of this new parameter will replace the merge tag in the editor preview, meaning that there’s no need to build a custom preview to display the final result of an email or landing page with rich personalization strings.

Displaying sample content during editing

Sample content strings are not limited to the preview, but can be displayed in the editor’s stage as mentioned above.

The way to do this depends on how your integration manages the toolbar options.

Toolbar enabled

In this case, you can simply enable the option “Show ‘Merge tag preview’ in toolbar” mentioned above.

When this option is active, the toolbar displays a new action to the user:

New in action in BEE default toolbar

The option works as a toggle that alternates between displaying the previewValue and the name parameter inside the merge tag UI.

Toolbar disabled

As with all the actions available in the BEE toolbar, we provide methods to control this option from your own UI:




beePluginInstance.toggleMergeTagsPreview()

Use this method to replicate the behavior described for the standard toolbar.