I’ve recently learned of an interesting trick that can allow you to insert your customer’s names into a page if they click through from an email or a page where they have entered their name.

This is a trick many do with software, but it’s not too hard to do on your own. Mostly it’s just knowing how to put in the PHP to add in the names. And you know what? It’s not all that difficult.

You will want to create a page in PHP. Name it as you want, but you will want it to end in.php.

If you name the variable “name” (without quotes), you can insert the name into the page with:

< ?php echo "$name"; ? > (take the space between ? and > or < out).

You can use this over and over again in the page.

Of course, there is the question: How does the page know the name?

The name is passed in the parameters of the webpage, that is: http://www.yousite.com/custompage.php?name=nametodisplay

Now let’s take a look at the email, as that’s fairly easy to edit appropriately. We’ll assume your list already has the names.

Most email hosts have a way you can insert a customer’s name. You will need to know how to do this. It is often something like [[name]] or %%name%%, so you will need to create the link as: http://www.yousite.com/custompage.php?name=[[name]]

One caution for this: You want the first and last name to be separate. If you use a variable that has both first and last name, it will create a space in the link, which may cause it to malfunction. If you only need the first name, only pass that variable. If you need the last name, you can pass it as http://www.yousite.com/custompage.php?firstname=[[firstname]]&lastname=[[lastname]] or however it works with your list. Firstname and lastname are, of course, the variables to be used on the page.

Doing this with a squeeze page or newsletter subscription is a bit trickier. The simplest solution is to use a software such as the Squeeze Page Generator to handle it for you. This software is geared toward creating single pages, but if you read the code generated you may be able to use it for newsletter subscription boxes on regular pages. Just a larger than average template tweak, if you care to think of it that way.

Personalization has great potential for increasing your sales. There is much more you can do with this if you give it some thought.

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