You never get a second chance to make a first impression with your email marketing campaigns. You have only a few moments to get someone’s attention and if you don’t make an immediate connection, you may have lost a golden opportunity.

The best way for your business to get the attention it deserves is by personalizing your messages.

Subscribers respond better to emails if the information contained within it is personalized to them. This could be as simple as addressing the email to someone by their name specifically or it could be as complex as referencing past purchases in the HTML newsletter.

Any field in your subscriber datasets can be incorporated into your message subject line or body for personalization. You can even, for example, personalize the "From" field if you are sending an email on someone else’s behalf.

Once you have loaded all your contacts into your address book, you firstly need to finish creating your newsletter before you can proceed.

To personalize an email, a personalization tag (which is kind of like a placeholder) is inserted into the email. When the emails are sent that tag is then replaced with the personal information that you have stored for that particular subscriber within your account.

With GraphicMail, adding a tag is simple: While you’re editing your newsletter, place your mouse cursor on the location where you want it to appear. Then from the “Insert Personalization” dropdown menu at the top of the screen, select the personalized information dataset (for example a first name or the recipient's occupation) you would like include on the email. So if you want each email to say “Dear” followed by the person’s first name, select the ‘First name’ dataset.

Just remember you need to have an address book or Contacts Database / Dataset set-up and you need to have imported your subscriber data into your account for this feature to work. Select a dataset (which you can find at the "Send to Mailing List" page in the "Sending" menu) then Select the field you want to personalize by clicking on 'Copy to clipboard' to the right of it. Then paste this code in your text where you want this field to be displayed and you're all done.

Quick! Simple! Powerful!

And the best thing is that there are no extra costs involved in sending personalized emails, since it's one of many useful features that come with a GraphicMail Advanced account.

Personalization is one way to show your subscribers you care about them and a key to your email marketing success. So make sure that you choose the right service provider to get your message across safely and securely.

Personalization helps you get people's attention, and once you do, make sure you use that little bit of valuable time to get to the point fast. Since people don’t have the time or patience for long emails, you have to explain what your bulk email marketing campaign is all about efficiently and informatively - and personalization is a way to open the door.