Personalized Greetings in your Customer.io Emails

Customer.io allows you to add personalization to your messages with liquid tags. The different liquid tags can be customer attributes and different event data. For example, Union will store your customer's first and last name. If you're wanting to include a call out to a customer by their first name, you can add the liquid tag  {{customer.first_name}} . Let's take a look how to add this in Customer.io!


To see how to customize with a customer's first name, please visit our support video too! This does not show the fallback statement. Please jump to "Fallback Statements" in this article to learn more.

Adding a Customer's Name

While you can always type the liquid in, you can easily locate all liquid tags when you click More > Add Liquid



Here's where you can see all the available data that can be added to your emails!

Once you've chosen the liquid syntax, the content section (where you build your emails) will expose the liquid syntax.


When you click Preview, you can see what your customer would see.


Fallback Statements

If you have customers who may not have a first name stored (this should never be the case, unless you uploaded a list directly to Customer.io where the names were not included), Customer.io does offer a fallback statement that can be used too! Here are two examples for using someone's first name. Always be sure to click Preview to verify!


Attribute Type: first_name (Union Customers and/or Union Marketing Customers)

We cannot stress enough, if you are uploading a marketing list, please follow these steps. You will be adding the list directly to your Union account rather than your Customer.io account. If you are looking to capture Sign-Up emails, you can add Union's marketing widget to your website to ensure they're being captured with the below format.

Use this statement if you want to include a fallback statement for a customer who has the attribute first_name:

{% if customer.first_name %} Hi {{customer.first_name}}! {% else %} Hi Buddy! {% endif %}

This is saying, if a customer has a first name stored, show Hi [customer name]! If they don't have a first name, show Hi Buddy!


Here's what it may look like when you add this to your email:


Here's an example of what a customer would see if they don't have a first name as an attribute.

Attribute Type: First Name (Manual Upload to Customer.io)

If you have previously uploaded a marketing list to your Customer.io account directly (rather than Union directly), no sweat! You can choose for these folks to have the fallback of your choice above, or use the First Name that was imported from your list.


Use this statement if you want to include a fallback statement for a customer who has the attribute First Name:

{% if customer.first_name %} Hi {{customer.first_name}}! {% else %}

Hi {{customer.{'First Name']}}! {% else %} Hi Buddy! {% endif %}

Here's what it may look like when you add this to your email:

To understand the difference with the attributes First Name and first_name, you can always note this when visiting People in Customer.io. Once in you're in a person's account, click Attributes. This will show you all the matching attributes this customer has with your org and Customer.io account.


Here's what the differences look like in the Attribute List


first_name First Name


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