Personalize signature templates using conditional formatting

Imagine you have a branded company signature. It’s looking good and all colleagues have the same consistent template. Some people however, would like to add personalized information, their working days for example. When everyone uses the same template, this can be quite challenging. Conditional formatting could be the solution. What if we tell you this can be easily done using mustache templating syntax?

Why would you use mustache templating syntax?

Because of the freedom to design whatever you want. You can create personalized templates without a restriction on what kind of information or conditional formatting you want to add.

Let’s use the working days as an example: Showing when you are on or offline isn’t always as easy. Whether you work full time but not always in the office, or work part time and aren’t always available, it can be difficult for colleagues to know when to expect a reply. Adding a sentence about your working days helps to manage expectations. This can easily be done using mustache syntax.

Using mustache syntax to tailor signatures to your user’s needs has 3 big advantages:

Both personal and consistent signatures:

Employees can have a personalized signature template that’s consistent with your branding, without the risk of people copying and pasting all kinds of different lay-outs and additions themselves.

A reduced amount of templates, due to conditional formatting:

The information listed in a signature can differ between users, without having to create other templates. Nor will the signature look weird due to missing information, If someone didn’t list a phone number, the whole phone number won’t appear.

And last but not least:

The sky is the limit:

Since mustache syntax adds the ‘if this, then that’-principle of conditional formatting to your templates, you can add all kinds of conditions and personalized information to signatures that aren’t available with preformatted options.

How do you use the mustache templating syntax?

Florbs supports using the mustache templating syntax to connect signatures with the Google Directory

This means you can add personalized conditions into signature templates. Retract names, working days or phone numbers from the Google Directory and add them into signatures automatically. Or, use these Google directory attributes to determine which information should be visible.

Whether you want to build something simple that only adds working days, or want to create a whole condition based template, the mustache templating syntax enables you to create a template that tailors itself to your users.

Using the example above, a template in Florbs could look like this:

Let’s explain it a bit more in depth:

To add working days of employees, you check whether someone put working days in and if that’s a yes: what should be printed:

1 |  {{#workingDays}}
2 |  I’m working on {{workingDays}}
3 |  {{/workingDays}}

{{#workingDays}} checks whether a contact field exists and whether it has a value (using contact field mapping).

When both conditions are met {{workingDays}} prints the listed working days out of the Google Directory into the signature of the user.

{{/workingDays}} marks the end of the conditional formatting.

That’s it. All users that listed working days will have the information added to their signature automatically. You can keep it this way, or add more conditions with any attribute within the Google Directory you want to use.

And, what if a user didn’t specify the information?

No worries. It will be left blank. There won’t be any strange looking syntax in your signature. When you use the syntax stated above, a user that didn’t specify the working days will have a signature that looks like this.

Mustache templating syntax is supported by the Florbs Email Signature Manager.

Interested to learn more? 

Get in touch or check our Email Signature Management solution.

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