Here is how I just doubled my response to my email list

Hi warriors,
Hey, I'm not even selling anything! I have learned a lot over my short time here on this forum so let me give a little back. Some of you old dogs may already know this but it was a surprise to me.

I just sent out an email to the subscribers on one of my sites. I usually get a good bump in visitors from my emails, but this one was 5 or 6 times the bump I usually get. In fact I actually doubled the largest number of users I had ever had to the site. The funny thing is that the email I sent was just a correction I felt my users needed to know about. No sales, no come on down pitch. What I did do is personalize the email. I had never messed with the tokens capability of my newsletter module, but I thought I would experiment and see how it worked. In the past I started my emails with "Hi everyone" or something like that. This email I set up to be "Dear [firstname] [lastname]" with the info filled in from their profile and selected the replace tokens option in my newsletter module. Not only did my visitors spike as described above, but I received a bunch of responses back thanking me for the correction and the site. Actually its kind of funny that some of my employees that have accounts said they couldn't believe I had taken the time to send them a personal email (Boy my fingers are tired from typing those thousands of emails ).

I guess we all know that people like their name - always use it in a sales conversation and such. I never realized that I was passing up a big chance to connect better with my users. From now on all my emails will be personalized similarly.