Larry's though here you're a certified MailChimp expert to help you simplify email marketing and in today's video I'm going to be showing you how to add personalization to your campaign emails and I'm also going to be answering the question why the heck should you personalize email what does that actually mean so let's get started answering those last two questions first what is personalization when it comes to campaign emails it's probably what you think it might mean and that is making your emails more personalized to that individual contact and why you should do it is because they want to have this interaction they want to have this engagement they've opted in to receive content from you and they want to be receiving information that is useful to them and to do that you want to make your content more personalized to them more catered toward them and how you do that is by using the data that you've been collecting over time you've been collecting purchases that they've made age you've been collecting links that they've clicked on you've been collecting Geographic data or age data or depending on your email marketing provider you've been even tracking links that they're clicking on on your websites using that data you can then send content to them specific personalized to them so that you get more engagement more clicks and more purchases so in today's video we're going to be taking a little piece of that personalization we're going to be adding a first name to our campaign email but it doesn't have to be just a first name you could use the full name you could use an email address you could use past purchases if you've capturing that data for the personalization to work in MailChimp MailChimp uses something called merge tags now merge tags are just a unique identifier that represents the actual data that's associated with each contact so let's go take a look at this and explain it a little bit more detail so I'm in my test audience dashboard I'm going to go over here to the right hand side click on the drop down and click on settings when we get on the settings page you can either scroll down a little bit and click on audience fields and merge tags or you can go up to settings here and click on audience fields and merge tags the audience Fields represents the field labels associated with your sign up form MailChimp then goes ahead and assigns a merge tag for each of the field labels in that sign up form and they put in some defaults they put in fname for first name L name for last name address for an address and phone for phone number you can add more field labels and mailchimple to sign more merge tags for each of those field labels to add a field to your sign up form you click on the very bottom here to add a field scroll down a little bit and we have several different types of fields that you can add to your audience signup form so you can have a text type of number radio buttons drop downs you can have a date birthday and Etc I won't be adding any additional Fields here but I wanted to show you that you can do that so we're going to click on cancel adding field also note that you can have these fields being required or visible in your sign up form we have here some things that are visible and some things that are not visible some things are required like the first name so let's go ahead and add fname merge tag to our campaign email so we switch over to all campaigns I've got one in draft here click on it open it up the first thing you should do to enable merge tags in your campaign email in the content of your email is to add an audience in the two section so if you click on edit recipients we see here that it's going to all subscribers in the test audience and a very neat little thing that MailChimp has is giving you the ability to add or to replace the email address that you're sending it to to as the first name or last name or you can even customize it if you wanted to so I have first name last name here as the merge tag so when a person receives my email it'll say to Larry snow versus to Larry at larrysnow.me which is a nice touch but let's keep it to first name and we'll click save so that's probably one of the first and easiest steps you can do to personalize your campaign emails I'll leave the subject blank for now and we'll click on edit so in the edit here I'm in the new MailChimp Builder the beta version but this will work just as well in the classic Builder I've got something here with a title that says welcome to the club well I want to add the first name here and I'll want to insert the merge tag that represents the first name so I'll click in here and I'll type in Hey space comma space now after hey right before the comma I want to go over here to the top right and click on merge tags and I want to select first name and that's how easy it is to add a merge tag that represents the first name of each your contacts now does it have to be just first name no you can add other merge tag fields to your campaign emails but we're just adding in first name for you to get an idea of how this all works the next thing you want to do is make sure that it works properly well how do we do that well MailChimp gives you the preview option so if we go over to the top right here click on preview and as we look at the preview you'll see it says Hey test first name what the heck does that mean well it's basically filling in what represents the merge tag if there actually was a first name here so how do we view that it's actually working properly over on the right hand side you'll see enable live merge tag info so in other words it's going to be picking up the data from your contacts and displaying it inside that merge tag so if we enable that we'll see that the test first name actually turns into a name that's associated with one of our contacts and we can click through to make sure all is working now if you have hundreds and thousands of contacts you're really not going to go through each one but this is more of a spot check to make sure that the merge tag is working as it should which in this case it is if we turn off enable live merge tag info it goes back to test first name let's click exit out of the preview mode so we know that our merge tag is working appropriately so the question you might be asking is well what if some of my contacts didn't use a first name because it wasn't required so they left that blank what am I supposed to do well MailChimp gives you a nice recourse and that is to put in default merge tag value so let's go take a look how that works so if I go back into my audience fields and merge tags you'll notice over here on the right hand side we have a column called default merge tag value so depending on what your list is for it could be a membership it could be an association it could be a variety of different things maybe it's just customer based whatever the main focus of your audience list is you want to think about what should be going in their default in lieu of a person's first name so let's stick with friend make sure you go down here to the bottom and click save changes all right our changes have been saved let's go back over to the campaign Builder go back into preview mode and see how this default merge tag value looks like and you notice right away where it used to say test first name now says hey friend because that is now the default merge tag value so if I enable live merge tag info so you notice that when there is a first name for that particular contact it will use that first name however if I start to click through my test list here you'll see one at one point it will change to hey friend because here it is right here Shemp doesn't have a first name associated with his contact details so in lieu of a first name we add in friend automatically because that's the default value does that make sense also notice when we're in preview mode and we've enabled live merge tag info remember that we've added in first name to the to field and that means if a person does not have a first name you'll be substituting that default merge tag value and in this case it will be friend so keep that in mind when you're using that to field if a person does not have a first name and then another question you might have is well what happens when I send a test email to myself what will I see well if you just send a test email to yourself it'll say hey friend because it's not going to have a value of a Associated contact because it's just a test email MailChimp provides a merge tag cheat sheet and I'll leave a link to that in the description below where you can go check that out and learn a lot more about the merge tags and what is out there for you to use in your campaign emails and automations and if you'd like to have a little bit more understanding of MailChimp I suggest these two videos we have one called Tags and another one about groups if you have any questions leave them in the comments below thanks so much for watching take care and I'll see you in the next video