Touchpoints allow you to communicate automatically. But how can you maintain the human touch and avoid 'one size fits all' emails and letters?

Student CRM allows you to use what you already know about a student to personalise your Touchpoints.

These tools are available in all Touchpoints in all Student CRM apps, but we will look at Prospectus Requests in this example.

The CRM Support team are always happy to help with setting up your Touchpoints, so do get in touch if you want any advice along the way.

Here, we will add some merged information to an instant acknowledgement email for a Prospectus Requests.

When a student fills in a prospectus request, they tell us which Subject and Year of Entry they are interested in. We can use this information within the body of the Touchpoint email.

Within the content text, place your cursor where you want to add this merged information. From the Mail Merge Fields list, select the information you want to insert. In this case, we want 'Year of Entry' and 'Subject of Interest'. The placeholder tag for these will appear in the body of the email.

Make sure you add spaces and punctuation appropriately around the tag.

The placeholder tag is replaced with the full Year of Entry and Subject of Interest when the Touchpoint is sent out to the student.

You can also use some merge fields within the subject line to allow better personalisation of emails. In our example, we've used a special tag called 'Dynamic Known As' to greet the student by name. This tag looks to see if the student has a preferred name (Student.known_as); if they don't, it uses their first name instead (Student.first_name).

You can use Mail Merge Fields within Letter and SMS touchpoints as well.

Merge fields can be used in both Touchpoints and Campaigns. However, due to them being different systems, they use different tag opener & closers.

Touchpoints use the [xxx merge_tag xxx] style of tags. There are automatic checks in place to ensure that you cannot use the incorrect style of merge tag, with the error message highlighting which tags have been used incorrectly.

For example, in the below error message "Student Address Line 2" must be changed to ​​​​​​​[xxxStudent.address_2xxx] before the Touchpoint will save.

This is a fragment of text (as short or as long as you want) which is merged into your Touchpoint only when a certain set of conditions is met. For instance, text which only appears when the student selects the option for their Prospectus to be delivered by Post.

Insert the special 'Conditional Text' Mail Merge Field into your email or letter where you would like this text to appear.

Q. Which fields can I merge in each app?

A. When you create your touchpoint, you'll already have access to all the most frequently used fields for merging in the Mail Merge Fields drop down (names, courses of interest, years of entry, levels of study etc). But nearly everything you can collect on a form about a student can be used as a mail merge. You can see the complete list of fields for each app in Data Manager > Field Finder.

Q. I don't see a custom data field I've collected on my form available in the Mail Merge Fields list, can it be added?

A. Yes, most of the time we can add anything from the Apps field list as a mail merge, including any custom fields you've used on a form. Just drop a line to Support in the usual way and we'll get that done.