It is crucial to personalize email marketing in order to ensure that your recipients feel you are speaking to them in a genuine manner. You can use merge tags and personalized fields to give your customers a better experience and make your messages more relevant.

You can specify a personalization tag when adding a custom field and those fields will populate automatically with subscriber information when you add your tags to the campaign and send your message.

Look at the following field:

Hi [field name,fallback]

field name can be substituted by, for example, firstname. Fallback can be substituted with any word you choose -- in this case, let's enter the word "friend". (See below to learn more about fallback fields.)

Hi [firstname,friend] – would pick the field [firstname] and populate it with the information available on your list, and if empty, would use friend instead.

So Hi [firstname,friend], will read either: ‘Hi Julia,’ or ‘Hi friend'

If you don't have the relevant information from the subscriber, like their first name, a fallback word can be automatically substituted. It can be any plain text, phrase, or word.

Here's an example:

Hi [field name,fallback]

Hi [firstname,there] – would pick the field [firstname] and populate it with the information available on your list, and if empty, would use there instead, so it will read either: ‘Hi Alex,’ or ‘Hi there,’

It's that simple! 🎉 The more you use merge tags and fallbacks, the more dynamic your campaigns will be -- enriching your engagement and performance.