{"id":12437,"date":"2020-05-30T03:23:48","date_gmt":"2020-05-30T03:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gmass.co\/blog\/?p=12437"},"modified":"2022-04-19T22:36:03","modified_gmt":"2022-04-19T22:36:03","slug":"personalize-to-header","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gmass.co\/blog\/personalize-to-header\/","title":{"rendered":"Conscientious cold emailers can personalize the “To:” header"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems silly. You’re used to personalizing<\/a> your cold email campaign’s<\/a> Subject<\/strong>. You’re used to personalizing its Message<\/strong>. You’re used to starting off your email with “Dear {FirstName}.” The thought of personalizing the “To:” header<\/strong> field might sound unnecessary, because obviously only the email address of the one person who is the recipient of the message should be in the “To:” field. But should anything else be there?<\/p>\n

For the meticulous, detail-oriented sender of cold email, the answer is a resounding “yes”<\/em> \u2014 they want to ensure the recipient’s first and last name are also present<\/strong> in the “To” field<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Cold Email To Header: The difference with and without<\/h2>\n

Here’s the difference, visually:<\/p>\n

\"unpersonalized
Unpersonalized TO header from Quora<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

vs.<\/p>\n

\"personalized
Personalized TO header from LinkedIn<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even worse<\/strong> is when emailers treat the email address as if it’s the same as the person’s name:<\/p>\n

\"unpersonalized
Unpersonalized TO header from The Wall Street Journal, where the name is the same as the email address<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But this is one of those advanced cold email tactics<\/a> that isn’t just about aesthetics, either.<\/p>\n

There is some anecdotal evidence (see below) that claims that when the name appears in the To field, it has a better chance to avoid spam filters<\/strong> and land in the Inbox. Why? Because when you send a normal person-to-person email, the name of the recipient is usually in the To field alongside the email address.<\/em><\/p>\n

Get the name in the To field when manually pasting addresses<\/h2>\n

If you’re manually pasting addresses into the Gmail Compose<\/strong> window (not using a Google Sheet as your list source), then you’ll notice that after you paste in the addresses, any addresses you already have saved as a Google Contact will automatically be converted to show the first-and-last name<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

If the first\/last name shows in the To<\/strong> field when you’re composing your campaign, then that same name\/email will be used when you click the GMass button to send the individual emails to the recipients.<\/p>\n

If the first\/last name isn’t already showing in the To field after you’ve pasted in addresses, that means that the address isn’t saved as a Google Contact. But that’s not an issue, because you can manually edit the address to add the name<\/strong>. Double click the email address in the To<\/strong> field, add the name, and surround the email address with angle brackets, like so:<\/p>\n

\"\"
This is how you edit an email address in the TO field to include the person’s name.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Get the name in the To field when reading from a Google Sheet<\/h2>\n

If you’re storing your email list in a spreadsheet and then using the Google Sheet<\/strong><\/a> connector button to pull the list into the To field, then GMass needs to know which columns in your spreadsheet contain the first and last names<\/strong> in order to put this information into the To<\/strong> field for each recipient.<\/p>\n

\"Google
Here’s a sample Google Sheet with “First” and “Last” columns, so the TO field can be personalized.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There’s no place to specify which columns contain the first and last names, so GMass attempts to auto detect it, just like we do with the email address column. Specifically, our algorithm looks for columns named any of the following:<\/p>\n