One of the most powerful tools you can use in email marketing is personalization. Including your recipient’s name or other identifying information helps to give your emails a truly individualized feel and can help increase readership. After all, people are much more likely to continue reading an email that addresses them by name, instead of a stock greeting like “Dear Reader.”
Earlier this year, Frank Chapman gave us a great post on how to use personalization in your messages, Getting Personal With Your Contacts. If you’re wondering how to get started using personalization, check out his article for a quick how-to guide.
If you’re already personalizing your emails, though, you may be missing out on a key feature: personalization testing. You probably already know that Bronto’s Send Test feature provides a quick view of message formatting and layout in your inbox. But with one simple step, you can also test your message personalization fields to ensure they’re working properly.
Once you’ve composed your message and are ready to test it out, click the Send Test button.
On the next page, set your sending options and recipients. Then, check the box marked “Use a random contact for personalization” shown below. Choosing this will pull the field value from a random contact and use it within your test message.
Only the field value from the random contact will be pulled – they will not be sent the message. Only the person(s) you specify in the sending options will receive the message.
Once you’ve checked this box, proceed with verifying and sending your test message. When you receive the message, you’ll see your personalization tag replaced with a value pulled from a random contact!
As always, if you have any questions about personalizing messages, feel free to post in the comments or to open a case from the Support link within your account.
Brad Gurley
Support Associate at Bronto
Related posts:
- Testing, Testing 1, 2, 3: Sending Test Messages As a Bronto user, you have probably been sending test...
- How Personalization Affects Link Tracking Back in June, Client Support Specialist Frank Chapman wrote a...
- Getting Personal With Your Contacts As an email marketer, your job is to elicit a...
{ 0 comments… add one now }