Getting Personal With Your Contacts

As an email marketer, your job is to elicit a response from your readership. One of the best ways to do this is by personalizing the messages that you send to your contacts. People generally will feel more at ease when they feel like they are being recognized as an individual.

A Greeting For Each Of Your Contacts

Adding a personalized greeting using a contact's first name in Bronto is an easy way to add a little more impact to any campaign.  To add a contact's first name to an email, all you need is the contact's name and a little know-how concerning field tags.

In this example we will be adding the contact's first name in a salutation.  You will need to have a field in Bronto that is storing your contacts' first names.  It is important to note that the name for a field needs to be in all lower case with no spaces.  In the case of the illustration below, the name of this field is "firstname".

Now, to add the field to your message, you will add this code %%firstname%% where you would like to see the name appear.

The application will see this tag and add the name as the message is sent.  The resulting message salutation will look like this:

What If I Do Not Have Everybody's Name?

It's okay, Bronto can help with that as well.  You will need to decide how you would like to refer to your contacts that you do not have first name information for.  As an example, we will call our nameless contacts "Valued Customer".

The tag that you would need to us is %%if(%%firstname%% is empty,"Valued Customer",%%firstname%%)%%.  This tag should look like the one in the image below when you preview your message.

This "if statement" is letting the Bronto application know that you would like to use the first name for the contact, unless you have no data available in the field for that contact.  If there is no data, the application will substitute the statement inside the quotation marks.

A Few Things To Remember About Field Tags In Bronto

• You must have a field in your account that corresponds to the field tag you wish to use (i.e. the "firstname" field that corresponds with the %%firstname%% field tag).
• You must refer to the field exactly by name. Spelling counts and the tag is case sensitive.
• Field tags aren't just for just salutations.  You can use field tags and the data that goes along with them for many other marketing purposes. Some examples of this would be, recent product purchases, important dates, or a dynamic link to a contacts personal landing page.

With a creative mind and a good knowledge of how field tags work in Bronto, you now have a tool with limitless marketing possibilities.  Please use this tool wisely and remember to always test and then test again.

Frank Chapman
Client Support Specialist at Bronto