Personalize Your Autoresponder Messages for Improved Results

Have you ever walked into a local store, restaurant, or other place of business and been addressed by name? This has probably happened to you at places you visit often. The owner or employee knows your name, and uses it. He or she wants you to know that they cared enough about you and your business to remember you. In the offline world, this is just one aspect of customer support and good business.

Customer service like this is almost impossible to achieve on the Internet, but some semblance of it can exist when you personalize your auto responder messages. Autoresponder messages can be set up to address people by their first name, last name or both. In fact, there is quite a bit of personalized information that can be added, depending on the auto responder that you are using.

Personalization is included in the autoresponder messages by using codes. Each auto responder will use different codes to insert the information in your messages. You simply write your message, and put the codes where you want the personalized information to appear.

One of the most popular and trusted auto responder services is Aweber. Here are some of the Aweber autoresponder's personalization codes:

{!name} – Prospects complete name
{!firstname} – Prospects first name
{!lastname} – Prospects last name
{!email} – Prospects email address

So if you were composing a personalized autoresponder message with Aweber here is how it would look:

Hello {!name},

Thanks for your recent interest in my 5 part email course. Over the next few days I will be sharing tons of valuable information with you about our lucrative industry. I guarantee you {!firstname} that this information can't be found anywhere else online so get ready!

This means that if a subscriber signed up for you list named Bob Bixby, he would get an email that said the following:

Hello Bob Bixby,

Thanks for your recent interest in my 5 part email course. Over the next few days I will be sharing tons of valuable information with you about our lucrative industry. I guarantee you Bob that this information can't be found anywhere else online so get ready!

Pretty cool huh!

Personalizing your auto responder messages will improve your response rate too. Research has shown that emails that are personalized with the person’s information are opened more often, and those people are generally more receptive to the contents of the email message. 

It is usually very easy to do. You write one message, using the codes where you want the personalization, then, no matter who that one email is sent out to, their personal information will appear where the codes are.

Of course, the autoresponder must collect the information first in order to personalize. This is done with the use of forms on your website that activate the auto responder in the first place. Your form should collect any type of information that you want for personalization – such as a first and last name as well as the email address. If that information is not collected, the autoresponder won’t have anything to insert where that code appears in your messages.

So the next time you set up a follow up series make sure you ad personalization to your messages. You may be very surprised at the improved results!