Profile Group features in Ardex Premier have been designed to be completely integrated with existing Mail Merge functions. Information stored in profile groups can be used to select recipients for mail merge, and also to populate merge fields in e-mails and printed material produced via the Ardex Mail Merge feature.
Select Criteria
Once profile groups have been enabled for your database you will notice a new selection criteria in Mail Merge called Profiles. You can now select mail merge recipients based on profile group membership, and profile values.
In the example above, you could run a mail merge to all members of the Stallion Parade Invites profile group by ticking ‘select all people with profiles in this group’. Alternatively, you could limit the mail-out to only those with a booking in 2003 by ticking that profile value. Use the ‘Generate List’ and ‘Close’ buttons as normal to create a Mail Merge recipients list.
Merge Fields
When performing a mail merge to Profile Group members all the standard mail merge bookmarks are available, for example name, address, balance due, email etc. In addition to these, every profile value in the profile group selected for the mail merge can potentially be used as a data merge field.
The method for merging profile data to a print document, to make each message personalised, is as follows:
When the message is in MS Word format, before saving to Web Page Filtered format (at the same stage ordinary mail merge bookmarks would be added) select text in the document to be used for data merge, click Insert at top of screen, then click Comment.
The comment text should be the name of the Profile Group with spaces replaced by the ‘underscore’ (_) character then another ‘underscore’ and then the profile name (with spaces replaced by _).
For example, if the profile group name is ‘Stallion Parade Invites’ and the profile name is ‘Invite Addressee’ then the comment for merge would be ‘Stallion_Parade_Invites_Invite_Adressee’. The relevant profile value will now replace the text selected when the merge is executed.
When merging to a printed document, you can use the Insert Comment function to add ordinary mail merge bookmarks as well as profile merge fields, assuming you are on a recently released version of Ardex Premier. This method won’t work however where you are merging to a HTML format e-mail.
Using Profile values as mail merge fields creates enormous potential to customise both e-mail and print communications generated via Ardex. For example, you could create a profile value Venue with type Text then enter a short description for the parade location for each state, to be merged to communications to invitation recipients in that state. An additional profile value could be created for parade date which again could be populated selectively based on address of the person.
