Adding a personal touch to your email campaigns helps you to build a better rapport with your contacts. You may wish to include a first name or reference to a product your customer purchased or perhaps an account number. This can all be done using what we call merge fields. Simply put, this is additional information about your contact other than their email address.
If you already have an Excel or CSV file which has this additional information, you can easily add the merge fields using the upload wizard. See Step 5 - Multi-Column Files on our Uploading a list using CSV or Excel file tutorial.
If you want to manually add this information to an existing address book, you would need to define your merge fields first. To do this, first select the address book you wish to work with, then from the address book utilities, select Define or edit fields.

This will open a small window below the utilities where you can define (aka - add) your own merge fields. Simply name them something easily identifiable and specific (i.e. First Name, is probably better than Name).
Then you can go in to each contact and manually add this information at your leisure. Read our manually editing contact information tutorial for a more detailed explanation on how to go about doing this.