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How to Automatically Insert a First Name in Mailchimp

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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Filed Under: Marketing

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Chantal says

    July 22, 2020 at 4:28 am

    thanks for the information, very helpful!

    Reply
    • Gary says

      July 22, 2020 at 8:51 am

      Glad it helped 🙂

      Reply
  2. Suresh says

    August 5, 2020 at 10:06 am

    Gary, Thanks for explaining in a very simple and easy ways how to customize e-mail and this article is very helpful.

    Reply
    • Gary says

      August 5, 2020 at 10:09 am

      Thanks Suresh.

      Reply
  3. emily says

    August 22, 2020 at 2:01 am

    When doing a test email it sends out like “Dear <>” We dont want to send out emails and have it not work? any suggestions ?

    Reply
    • Gary says

      August 22, 2020 at 8:36 am

      Hi Emily, please see https://organicweb.com.au/marketing/mailchimp-fname-testing/

      Reply
  4. Javier Mora says

    September 10, 2020 at 5:06 am

    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!

    Reply
    • Gary says

      September 10, 2020 at 8:21 am

      Hi Javier, please make sure that you have selected an Audience before trying to add merge tags.

      Reply
  5. Rosie says

    November 5, 2020 at 1:26 pm

    Hi Gary, can you let me know how it will work if I have my own code?

    Reply
    • Gary says

      November 5, 2020 at 4:56 pm

      Hi Rosie, please expand on your question. Are you referring to custom coding a template or using the code block?

      Reply
  6. gdcli says

    January 17, 2021 at 5:46 am

    Gary, Is there a quick way to add the first names to a list of email-address-only subscribers in mailchimp?

    Reply
    • Gary says

      January 21, 2021 at 2:36 pm

      The easiest way is to export your contacts, add the first name and then import the contacts again.

      Reply
  7. Shayla says

    January 21, 2021 at 9:32 am

    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!

    Reply
    • Gary says

      January 21, 2021 at 2:31 pm

      Hi Shayla, there are various ways;

      • Edit the contact record for each contact you want to add the first name for or
      • Export your Audience then add the first names in a spreadsheet then import again.

      I hope that helps.

      Reply
  8. Michael says

    March 9, 2021 at 8:55 pm

    How do you select the audience before designing the template? I also only get the email address option.

    Reply
    • Gary says

      March 10, 2021 at 8:05 am

      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/

      Reply
  9. John says

    June 9, 2021 at 10:49 pm

    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

    Reply
    • Gary says

      June 11, 2021 at 8:49 am

      Hi John,
      This usually occurs when:

      • The name of the default first name field has been amended in Mailchimp or
      • the merge tag is being inserted incorrectly
      Reply
  10. Helen says

    October 26, 2021 at 12:31 am

    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.

    Reply
    • Gary says

      October 26, 2021 at 7:28 am

      Hi Helen, you’ll need to enter the contacts correct first names into Mailchimp.

      Reply
  11. Anitha says

    March 31, 2022 at 11:01 pm

    Hi Gary. I tried this and it was working fine in preview mode but while receiving mail ,first name is not displayed.

    Reply
    • Gary says

      April 1, 2022 at 7:00 am

      Hi Anitha, if it is a test email you sent yourself the first name won’t display. Try sending yourself the actual campaign.

      Reply

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