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Email personalization allows you to create relevance on an individual level, which can make all the difference when someone is quickly deciding between dismissing or engaging with your content. With this in mind, here are a few spots where a bit of personalization goes a long way:
- Subject Line: Given it's the first thing a recipient sees, your chosen subject line has a significant effect on open rates, and research shows that including the recipient’s first name in the subject line can increase open rates by over 25%.
- Body Content: You can use Privy to ask your contacts about themselves, their preferences, and much more. Putting this information to work and making your emails more relevant to the recipient is an effective way to increase engagement, drive traffic to additional content, and increase sales. In fact, RichRelevance found that the average click-through rate is 2.5x higher and revenue is up to 5.7x higher in emails that utilize personalization.
- Calls-to-Action: A call-to-action (CTA) is a button or link placed in your content to drive prospective customers to a specific resource or page. While not always needed or appropriate, personalizing certain CTAs can make them more appealing and intuitive.
How personalization works
Information collected about an individual is stored in fields on their contact profile (e.g., First Name). This information then becomes available for exhibition in your emails via merge tags. When viewed by a contact in an email, these tags automatically reference and show the related information.
Supported merge tags
The merge tags supported for use in emails are outlined below.
| Merge Tag | Information Shown |
| {{ contact.email }} | The email address of the contact. |
| {{ contact.first_name }} | The contact's first name. |
| {{ contact.last_name }} | The contact's last name. |
| {{ contact.name }} | The contact's full name. |
| {{coupon_code}} | The coupon that is associated with the email. |
| {{ contact.custom_fields.* }} |
The value stored in a custom field used to collect contact information. For example, {{ contact.custom_fields.favorite_color }} would show the contact's Favorite Color value. |
Additionally, some tags are available that populate with information tied to your business or the recipient's ability to manage their relationship with your business. These tags are:
| Merge Tag | Information Shown |
| {{ business.name }} | The name of your business. |
| {{ business.unsubscribe_link }} | A link that unsubscribes the recipient from your future emails. |
Insert personalization merge tags
The steps required to insert a personalization merge tag differ slightly depending on where you'd like the merge tag to appear in your email.
- Subject Line: A merge tag must be manually typed/placed into your email subject line. The easiest way to do this is to copy the tag from this page or insert the tag into the email body using the editing toolbar and then copy/paste the value into the subject line field.
- Body Content: To insert a merge tag into the body content of an email, click into a Text Box, select the Merge Tags dropdown menu from the editing toolbar, and select the desired field.
- Call-to-Action: A merge tag must be manually typed/placed into a CTA. The easiest way to do this is to copy the tag from this page or insert the tag into the email body using the editing toolbar and then copy/paste the value into the button's text field.
Default values
For any merge tag, you can add a default value to provide a placeholder if there is no information available to pull in from the recipient's contact profile. If a default value isn't provided and there's no value on the contact profile, a blank space will appear instead. To include a default, use this format:
| Merge Tag | Example Output |
| Hi {{ contact.first_name|default:'there' }}, | Hi John, OR Hi there, |
Preview personalization
Select the Send Test Email option at the top of the email editor to ensure all of the content and personalization are exhibited as expected in your inbox. Please Note: The test email is sent to the email address associated with your Privy account and populates with the information associated with that user. If a value is unknown, a merge tag will not populate unless a default value is set.
Personalized email example
This example customer appreciation newsletter uses merge tags to show the customer's name, the customer's rewards status, and a loyalty coupon code.
| Merge Tags in the Editor | Example Output |