How to use Shout Nouns
Overview
Shout Nouns are a great way to personalize your broadcast messages, bots, and drips. A "noun" is a simple phrase surrounded by two curly braces that tells Shout to insert information from your account, such as a person's name. For example this phrase:
Shout will automatically insert the contact name when the message is sent. So the message will be received as:
Nouns are a powerful and convenient feature. Imagine trying to send the simple message above to a broadcast list with 500 contacts. You'd either need to write the message 500 different times to personalize it for each person or remove the name altogether. With nouns, Shout will automatically handle adding the name for you.
Adding Nouns to Your Messages
You can easily add nouns to your messages using the composer. Simply look for the Nouns icon:
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Tap or click the icon and Shout will display the most frequently used nouns available. Tap the noun that you want to use, and Shout will automatically insert it into your message where you left off typing (at the current cursor location).
To view all the nouns that are available in shout, visit the Shout Nouns Dictionary.
Noun Errors
Sometimes you may misspell or use a Noun that isn't available. For example, if you incorrectly type:
Shout will give you an error message that says: "The noun {{customer.name}} does not exist". These errors prevent you from sending messages with improperly formatted nouns that Shout doesn't recognize.
Other times, you may just forget a curly bracket like this:
Shout will give you an error: "Variable '{{contact.name}' was not properly terminated". This error prevents you from sending messages with nouns that haven't been written correctly.
The simplest way to avoid Noun errors is to use the composer menu and have Shout automatically add the noun to your message for you.
Noun Defaults
Sometimes, you might use a noun to send a message where Shout doesn't actually know what information to replace the noun with. For example, you could send the message above to 2 contacts, one where you have their name and another where you do not have the contact name saved in Shout. What does Shout do? By default, Shout simply replaces the noun with nothing.
Let's use our simple example above to demonstrate how the default works. Specifically, you sent a message where the contact you have in Shout doesn't have a name, perhaps you only have a phone number and you've forgotten to add your name to their contact. The end result would be as follows:
If you don't like the way that Shout handles these defaults, you can change it by adding your own custom default right inside the noun itself. For example, if you wanted to use the phrase "hot stuff" as the default name (hopefully you're good friends), you'd write your noun as follows:
When Shout sends this message to a contact without a name, the contact will receive the new default as follows:
If you make a mistake with your default syntax, for example, if you forget a quotation mark " or forget the pipe " |", Shout will automatically give you a warning when you try to send it so you can make the correction. (We still recommending testing these though ... especially if you're trying to be cutesy with phrases like "hot stuff".)
Other really cool stuff
Nouns come with a lot of really cool stuff that, frankly, most people will never use. However, if you think you can handle some really cool stuff, like customizing your messages based on attributes, then Shout Nouns can probably handle it. Nouns in Shout are powered by the Liquid Syntax developed by the engineering team at Shopify. You can check out the full Liquid Syntax here. We haven't tested it all, so proceed at your own risk and let us know what amazing stuff you build with Shout Nouns!
