How to Use Smart Snippets

Turn your AOB copy into Smart Snippets with Template Variables to personalize the messaging for each prospect.

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When do you want a Smart Snippet?

Before we begin, it’s useful to consider whether a Smart Snippet is the best solution to your use case. As a rule of thumb:

(Smart) Snippets are concise, self-contained pieces of text that serve one communicative purpose. Each snippet should be laser-focused on the parts of your outbound message that change the most to fit each recipient differently.

For example, if each of your outbound emails starts with a call to action that leans into your prospect’s current company, position and past experiences to grab their attention, Smart Snippets uniquely enable you to automate this strategy at scale. On the other hand, we don’t generally recommend using Smart Snippets to generate multi-paragraph emails—they’re best used for the sections of your email that you want personalized using information about the prospect’s role or their company. Instead, use-cases with a smaller degree of personalization, such as copy that references the prospect’s name, your company’s name, or the current date, can often be handled with Template Variables alone.

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Creating a Smart Snippet

1. First, navigate to the Snippets tab in Unify and find the New Snippet button.

2. Next, select Smart Snippet in the modal that opens.

3. Here, you can set your new snippet’s title, sharing permissions and finally the content itself. Just like in the Sequence builder, you’ll be able to scroll through available Template Variables and insert them where needed in your snippet.

4. Using the editor, construct a detailed prompt with instructions for your snippet. Make sure to reference our Tips & Tricks below as you go!

5. If you’ve used Template Variables in your snippet, add a fallback below. This will replace the snippet output whenever any of the input variables in the prompt do not have data for a specific person.

6. Click ‘Generate examples’ to see what your snippet will generate on a sample of real people from your Unify data! Your fallback value will show whenever that person doesn’t have the requisite data for the Template Variables in your snippet, so if you see it frequently this is a good signal that one of your referenced variables has low coverage across prospects, and the snippet might not activate frequently in practice.

7. When you’re all done, click Create to save your snippet to Unify.

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Tips & Tricks

Here are a few practices we follow ourselves at Unify to get the most effective copy from our Smart Snippets:

1. Always include at least one Template Variable referencing you, the recipient or their company to the prompt: Even if you don’t need to repeat the value of the variable in your output (e.g. a self-introduction that tailors itself to your recipient audience but doesn’t call out any of the info), Template Variables will provide the generation with personalized context that keeps outputs more precise and effective.
2. Always include 2-3 example outputs to guide your snippet generation: A good example is key to enforcing more open-ended or implicit constraints on your snippet’s behavior, such as tone or paragraph structure. Generated outputs will often pick up on vocabulary and other stylistic choices you make in these examples, so add multiple examples to demonstrate a range of acceptable results. Try to be as realistic as possible to outbound you would write yourself!
3. Make explicit reference to the level of detail you want in your output: while our AI can adapt to a variety of complex instructions, it’s important to keep the outputs concise in the end! Besides adding examples of the desired length, specifying a desired range of lengths in words/sentences can ensure more consistent results.