Fallbacks and blanks

Contact data is never complete. Piksio decides what a recipient with a missing value sees, the same way on every platform, so you set it once in Piksio instead of in each tool.

When does a value count as missing?

• The parameter isn’t in the link, or it’s empty.
• Your platform left the merge tag unfilled, for example in a test email: *|FNAME|*, {{ first_name }}, %FIRSTNAME%, [[contact.first_name]], %recipient.fname%, %%FirstName%%.
• The value doesn’t fit the field: a colour field that gets banana, a number field that gets n/a.

What a recipient sees

Field	No value, no fallback	With a fallback
Text	That part is left out, with its extra space: “Hola {{first_name}}” reads “Hola”	The fallback: “Hola amigo”
company_logo	No logo; the layer is hidden	—
Other images	The image in your design	—
Colours and numbers	The value in your design	—

Leaving text out handles punctuation too: “Hi {{first_name}}, welcome” reads “Hi, welcome”.

Set a text fallback

On a template’s or an AI design’s result screen, type it under When a detail is missing, and switch the preview to No data (fallbacks) to see exactly what someone with no data receives.

For a saved image, open Use in email, type it in If blank, show next to the field and click away. It’s saved straight to the image and applies to the live link immediately, no re-save needed. Fallbacks can be up to 512 characters.

Tip

A fallback that reads naturally in the sentence works best. For first_name in “Hola {{first_name}}”, try “amigo” or “there”.

Platform-specific rules

A few tools won’t send an email when a variable has no value, before Piksio ever sees it:

• Apollo skips the email. Map only fields every contact has.
• Amazon SES doesn’t send a templated email with a missing tag. Send every field; an empty string is fine, and Piksio then shows the fallback.

Each platform’s page under Integrations lists its own rules.