In Mailchimp it’s simple to personalise each email marketing campaign. Follow these instructions to have the first name of each subscriber added to your email campaigns.
How to Add Contact’s First Names Automatically
Time needed: 2 minutes.
Follow these instructions to have Mailchimp automatically add the first name for each contact into your email campaign.
- Start designing your Mailchimp email campaign.
Login to Mailchimp, click “Create Campaign” and start creating your email campaign. Make sure you add your Audience and get as far as the “Design” screen.
- Go to edit a text block
Click on an existing text block or add a new text block to your campaign and click to edit the text block.
- Add the first name merge tag
Click (place your cursor) wherever you’d like the first name to appear to the right side of the screen, click “Merge Tags” in the toolbar and then click “First Name”.
Your recipients will now see their first name where you added the first name merge tag.
Video Transcript
Hi I’m Gary a Mailchimp partner from organicwebcomau.wpcomstaging.com.
We know that if we personalise our marketing we get better results. Fortunately in Mailchimp it’s incredibly simple to personalise our email marketing. I’ll show you how we can insert the first name into an email.
So in Mailchimp itself I’m in the email marketing campaign builder. I’m going to click “Edit design” and then wherever we have a text block I can click to edit it. Of course I could have added a text block where I want my greeting. I’ll put my cursor, add my greeting such as “hi” and I want to include the first name for each recipient so all I do is I click the “merge tags” button in the toolbar and click “first-name” and I might want to add a comma. So each recipient will now be greeted with their own first name. I could also add that into the header. For example I want “Mailchimp training” space first name.
And that’s how simple it is to personalise your email marketing.
Thanks for joining me.
thanks for the information, very helpful!
Glad it helped 🙂
Gary, Thanks for explaining in a very simple and easy ways how to customize e-mail and this article is very helpful.
Thanks Suresh.
When doing a test email it sends out like “Dear <>” We dont want to send out emails and have it not work? any suggestions ?
Hi Emily, please see https://organicweb.com.au/marketing/mailchimp-fname-testing/
Hi, Gary! My Merge Tag/Member Data doesn’t include Member NAME, only email. Is it because I am using the free version of MailChimp??? Hope it’s not!
Hi Javier, please make sure that you have selected an Audience before trying to add merge tags.
Hi Gary, can you let me know how it will work if I have my own code?
Hi Rosie, please expand on your question. Are you referring to custom coding a template or using the code block?
Gary, Is there a quick way to add the first names to a list of email-address-only subscribers in mailchimp?
The easiest way is to export your contacts, add the first name and then import the contacts again.
Hi Gary, great post! Can you advise how I can add first names to my member data for existing subscribers? I have only recently added this field to my sign-up page and as a result my early subscribers’ names were not captured. Luckily these were mostly people I know personally!
Hi Shayla, there are various ways;
I hope that helps.
How do you select the audience before designing the template? I also only get the email address option.
Hi Michael,
Mailchimp treats templates as independent of an audience. You can manually insert the first name merge tag should you wish to – https://mailchimp.com/help/all-the-merge-tags-cheat-sheet/
Hi Gary, I set up the contacts first name to personalize the campaign, but the name doesn’t appear in my emails. Any thoughts? Thanks, John
Hi John,
This usually occurs when:
Gary I tried this, thanks, but then realised lots of my audience have a single letter initial instead of their name. How can I fix this, there are thousands! Thank you.
Hi Helen, you’ll need to enter the contacts correct first names into Mailchimp.
Hi Gary. I tried this and it was working fine in preview mode but while receiving mail ,first name is not displayed.
Hi Anitha, if it is a test email you sent yourself the first name won’t display. Try sending yourself the actual campaign.