How to Add the First Name to your Mailchimp Campaign

It is proven that by greeting our subscribers by their name increases interaction rates (and subsequently sales or donations). Fortunately it is simple in Mailchimp to automatically add the first name of each subscriber to our email campaigns.

Instructions to Add a Subscribers First Name in Mailchimp

1. Enter the first name of your subscribers in your list First Name field.
2. Start creating your campaign and add a text block when you reach the Edit Design stage of creating a campaign.
3. In the text block, type your initial greeting (e.g. Hi or Dear).
4. Click the word Merge Tags (near the various styling icons).
5. Click First Name.

The first name that you’ve added against the email addresses in your list will now appear for each contact.

What to Do If You Don’t Have All Subscribers First Names

If you don’t have a first name in your list for every contact then it’s important to add a default value for your merge tag. Adding a default merge tag value ensures that if you don’t have the first name for any subscribers then they’ll see a value that you define (rather than an empty space). Read how to add a default value for the first name field in Mailchimp.

How to Test Personalization

The simplest way to test that your merge tag is working correctly is to enter preview mode and then activate the Enable live merge tag info selector. By doing this you’ll see the merge tags that you’ve added fill for one of the contacts in your list.