Personalise your ‘from’ name with Mailchimp merge tags

Mailchimp’s rich suite of merge tags allow you to personalise e-mail content based on data you have about your recipient, list or company. Most of this geared around doing things like:

Dear [Recipient], welcome to our Newsletter for [month].

Where the first name of your subscriber and the month are automatically inserted from their data in your list.

Although Mailchimp claims that including a first name can improve deliverability through spam filters, I feel that the downside is an e-mail that sounds disingenuous. Everyone knows that these names are merged in automatically and there’s nothing personal about a mass e-mail. If anything, it’s less personal than something like:

Hi all, this is our newsletter for an unusually sunny August, let us know what you think.

Don’t personalise, be personable

At Picket, we do something a little different. Instead of personalising who our e-mails are sent to we personalise who they were sent from.

We try to maintain a high quality list of people that actually, personally know us so and feel it’s important that e-mails arrive from the partner our contacts are most familiar with, so we want the “from” name to be from the person who “owns” the relationship.

Interestingly, in their Mobile E-mail Marketing Guide, Campaign Monitor (an Australian Mailchimp competitor) claim that “68% of Americans say they base their decision to open an email on the ‘from’ name”, though sadly they don’t cite the survey or study on which that statistic is based.

Whether this is true or not isn’t the point for us — we simply want our e-mails to be as personal as possible.

How to

Personalising the “from” address using information from your list is relatively easy, although there’s no mention of this in Mailchimp’s own documentation, this effect is relatively easy to achieve:

1. Add a column to your Audience list that you’ll use to display the sender’s “from” name. We use a one called “Contact Owner”, and set it’s merge tag to *|OWNER|*.
2. Set a default Merge value for the column so that those who don’t have an owner get the usual generic “from” name, such as your company name.
3. When setting up a campaign, enter your new *|OWNER|* (or equivalent) merge tag in the “from” field.

Adding the merge field in Campaign settings

I haven’t experimented with conditional logic in that field, but in theory you should be able to display whatever content you like based on any given merge field in Mailchimp, so something like this should be entirely possible:

*|IF:FROM_NAME|* *|FROM_NAME|* *|ELSE:|* *|LIST:COMPANY|* *|END:IF|*

Happy merging.