Substitution inserts the recipient's name or username into the text. An old trick that works less well than people assume.
Why a name alone is not enough
«John, hello! We offer promotion services» reads as a broadcast despite the name. A name does not make a message personal — it makes it a message with a name in it. What makes it personal is what comes next: why you are writing to them specifically.
What an empty value does
Some people have no name set and no username at all. Substitution then produces either a gap («, hello!») or technical debris. Either gives the mechanism away instantly.
So substitution needs a fallback — a neutral greeting, not an empty string. And that is the case to test: rare, but conspicuous.
What real personalisation looks like
- Where you found them. «I saw your question in the letting chat» beats any name.
- What their problem is. With a segmented list you can write to the segment rather than to everyone.
- Nothing. An honest short message without a name beats a falsely personal one.
About segments
Different texts for different groups outperform one text with substitutions — segmentation.
When a name belongs
When you actually know the person or they left a request. In cold outreach a name is decoration that more often gets in the way.
How Neurogram does this
Everything above is manual work that runs into the number of hours in a day. Neurogram does it on your own accounts and without you: it collects channels and audiences, writes comments and replies with a language model, and keeps limits and quiet hours so the accounts survive. See pricing or look at your case.