Using Campaign Variables

There are several posts regarding dynamic fields and campaign variables:

How do I send a campaign from a contact manager if one is assigned?

How do I pre-populate forms with contact data?

How do I Use Dynamic Fields in Workflows?

Campaign Variables are used exactly like Dynamic Fields, the difference being that custom rich content can be pulled out of a campaign and into a variable. The idea is that if you are doing one type of campaign over and over, with a few blocks of content being the only thing that changes from one campaign to another, extract the content into a Campaign Variable. 

Campaign Variables are defined in the campaign interface under the 'Variables' tab:

A campaign variable can either be Full HTML or Plain Text.

1. Variable name (can be any characters including spaces)
2. Variable Type (HTML/Text)
3. Variable description
4. Content

When you save the variable, the variable definition will be changed to be of the format:

%CAMPAIGN.TOKENS(VARIABLE_NAME).VALUE%

It is important to ensure you are using the right type of variable for the right task. For example, if you are using a variable for the 'from email address' or 'reply to email address', you cannot use HTML. You must use plain text. If you want to ensure your campaign variable renders with the context specific styling, again, use the Text version. If the context dictates a full HTML panel, then use the HTML type.

The Campaign Variables are typically accessible via a content block editor by clicking on the tag icon.

As an example, consider a webinar campaign. Not much changes from webinar to webinar, hence pull out the variable data into a campaign variable. Things like presenter bio, topic, images, etc can all be extracted into Campaign Variables. The date of the webinar ... is a great example of a place for a campaign variable.

The date variable (for example %CAMPAIGN.EVENT_DATE%) can be used to auto-redirect the registration page to a 'view the recording' page by using Campaign Variables.

In the example above, this was used %CAMPAIGN.EVENT_DATE% + 0.5.days for the redirect date. Note, similar to Dynamic Fields, that date math can be used.

The format for date math is 

%CAMPAIGN.TOKENS(SOMEDATE).VALUE% + 3.days

or

%CAMPAIGN.TOKENS(SOMEDATE).VALUE% - 1.week

So: the form is %VARIABLE% [+-] [0-9].[days|weeks|months|years]

The date format of the Campaign Variable is dd/mm/yyyy ... with time dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss (24 hour clock)

Campaign Landing pages can be reference by using the format "NAME_NAME2_NAME3".  The landing page named "Register For Webcast" is referenced in the example above as REGISTER_FOR_WEBCAST. This does not work well if you name all of your pages the same in a campaign. Thus the page is reference by

%CAMPAIGN.CTA(REGISTER_FOR_WEBCAST).URL%