An Easier and Quicker Way to Personalize Your Emails

Email personalization has always been key to growing your sales and an integral part of SmartrMail. That’s why we’re excited to announce some big changes to the feature that lets you customize and personalize your emails the easiest: merge fields. 

What are merge fields?

Merge fields let you add dynamic content to your email templates and newsletters that are populated with data unique to the individual subscriber receiving the email. 

Perhaps the most common way this is used is to greet subscribers by their names. As in the example below.

When you send an email with this ‘subscriber name’ merge field, when your subscribers open your email, they will see their own name.  

Changes we’ve made

SmartrMail has always enabled you to add merge fields to your emails, our recent update however makes the process faster and easier than ever before. 

As you can see in the GIF above, you now simply select what type of personalized content you’d like to add (subscriber’s name, last product purchased, total order count, etc.) and the merge field is added automatically. 

You no longer have to remember how to properly format the merge field or go looking it up in our support docs. 

You’re also presented with an option to add fallback text. Fallback text is what will be displayed in the email if the relevant customer data isn’t available. In the example above, if someone signed up for your email list without giving their name, then the email will read “Hi there”.

More merge fields to choose from 

In addition to making it easier to add merge fields in your emails, we’ve also expanded the number of different types of merge fields you can choose from. 

The full list of merge fields you can add to your campaigns are:

• Subscriber’s first name
• Subscriber’s last name
• Subscriber’s full name
• Subscriber’s email address
• Your store’s name
• Your store’s physical address
• Your subscriber’s country
• The last product your subscriber purchased
• The last product your subscriber abandoned
• The last product collection your subscriber purchased from
• The last collection your subscriber abandoned a product from
• The total amount of money your subscriber has spent at your store
• The total number of orders your subscriber has made at your store
• The total amount of the last order your subscriber made 

Additionally, in your product recommendation and abandoned cart emails, you can also use the following merge fields:

• The title of the first product shown in the email
• The title of the last product shown in the email

On buttons within product blocks, you can also add a merge field to show the product’s price.

You can learn more about using merge fields in SmartrMail here.

The importance of merge fields

Now is a great time to start using merge fields if you haven’t been doing so already. 

While greeting your subscribers by name is an obvious way to get started, you can personalize your emails so much more deeply. 

If you have a thank you for your purchase email set up to send, you can use merge fields to display which product your customer purchased. So, for example, if someone purchased a coffee machine, you could have a subject line like “Hey Nora, are you enjoying your new De’Longhi Cappuccino Machine?”.

Or if you have a cross-sell email set up, you could use the merge field of the last product collection your subscriber purchased from, in this case, coffee machines, to send a personalized subject line like “Hey Nora, check out these blends to satisfy your coffee cravings”. 

By using merge fields in your subject lines like this, they’ll resonate with your email list and stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes, drastically improving your open rate. 

Following this up by also using merge fields to personalize your email content will also improve your click-through rates and drive more sales. 

If you have a customer loyalty program that rewards people based on how much they’ve spent at your store or how many orders they’ve placed, you could, for example, use merge targets to display this information at the bottom of your emails. 

Start sending personalized emails today

We know that emails with personalized subject lines get opened 30% more often and emails with personalized content achieve six times higher transaction rates. 

And it’s not just email engagement that improves. Personalized emails result in an over 50% increase in customer satisfaction from your subscribers. 

So with email personalization being so important and merge fields easier and quicker to use than ever before, now’s the time to start personalizing your emails!