Introduction to Liquid
Want to drive engagement and conversion? It’s all about getting up close and personal with your audience. And that’s what Liquid allows you to do! Whatever data you have about your leads and customers can be transformed into content that lines up exactly with who they are, what they do, and what makes them tick—and click!
This tutorial will walk you through using Liquid—from the fundamental concepts to the down-and-dirty code you need to make it happen. It’s geared toward marketing folks who don’t have heavy programming experience, so you’ll understand how everything works and be able to confidently collaborate with developers to execute your personalized content.
We’ll start with the basics to give you a thorough grounding in what Liquid is, then dive deeper into some intermediate and advanced topics. Along the way, you’ll see examples and get to practice applying the concepts—and end with the skills you need to use it with confidence.
By the way, Liquid can be used for both websites and emails. In this tutorial, we’ll be using emails as examples, but the principles you learn can be applied to all kinds of things, from campaign landing pages to ecommerce sites and more.
A note about word choice
There are now many “flavors” of Liquid. As a result, there’s a lot of Liquid documentation out there, and it doesn’t always agree on what to call things. The main culprit is what we’re calling keys—for instance, some folks call those “objects,” but that can get confusing when we start talking about JSON and JavaScript objects (don’t worry, we’ll explain those in this tutorial!).
Other terminology can vary as well—such as what people call the different types of tags you can use in Liquid. People even disagree on what to call Liquid itself! It’s been referred to as a template language, a template syntax, and a template engine.
We’ll call out any particularly tricky vocab, but don’t get too hung up on the language. We’ll use the same terminology throughout this tutorial so you’ll be crystal clear on the concepts, and you’ll be equipped to translate most documentation you come across. And, more importantly, you’ll be able to talk to developers without getting laughed at! (Well, probably—depends on how many snacks you bring to the meeting.)