In today's Q&A, we are helping Tanya decide if she should use personalization in her email autoresponder or if it just feels fake. Special guest Michael O'Neal of solopreneurhour.com brings his perspective into the conversation and offers some great advice about how to write better emails for your audience. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Write directly to your audience vs the generic route @solohour"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today's expert is Michael O'Neal from solopreneurhour.com Today's question is from Tanya Grant at craftymummy.com Aweber - Email Marketing Software Check out Michael on twitter @solohour Let's dive into this week's question! JOCELYN: Hey y'all! You're listening to an expert Q and A with S and J. Today's expert is Michael O'Neal of the Solopreneur Hour Podcast in solopreneurhour.com SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: What's going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. This is another Q and A with S and J. We got a special one for you today. We have another expert Q and A. super excited to invite this guy on for the first time to our expert Q and A podcast. Today we have Michael O'Neal from the Solo Hour and Solopreneur podcast at solohour.com. Michael welcome to the show man, MICHAEL: What's up you guys? Good morning for me and afternoon for you. JOCELYN: Absolutely. SHANE: That's right. We got lunch cooking you got some breakfast cooking I think. MICHAEL: I smell it. I just had a protein shake so that counted as breakfast. SHANE: That's right. That's all you need brother. That's all you need. MICHAEL: That's right. JOCELYN: Alright. Well we have a great question for you today. This is from Tanya Grant of the craftymummy.com. I assume she is in the UK somewhere. Nope, just kidding, it's Australia. It says, "I am in sunny Queensland Australia and you guys keep me company when I am cooking dinner. That's when I listen to your podcast of course I am curious whether you use personalization in your emails and how important you think this is. I often see emails which inserts the reader's first name in the greeting and the subject and I have tried this in my own email newsletter but I am not sure how effective it is. It seems fake, doesn't everyone already know that is a form letter? What do you think?" SHANE: This is a good question. We have experimented a lot with this and I know you do a lot of marketing yourself so I am very interested on what you think about this Michael. Do you think it's good to add personalization? Or do you think that I something that most people kind of see through or does it even matter? MICHAEL: I think that it's funny. I don't know that everybody sees through it. When I do an email to my list and I say hey I'd love to hear—guest suggestions for instance. People are writing me back. Oh man thanks for writing me. SHANE: Right we get those too. MICHAEL: So you don't realize that it is sort of response from an auto responder if it will. Also I don't know if everybody feels like it is not personalized even though all the current modern software allows you to basically when you compose the email—this is just for your listeners—you can compose the email and there is just a little chunk of code that you can put in that will say, "Hey [blank]" and then that blank is first name. Depending on what you captured form them originally, typically it's name and email now but sometimes you can get more than that, first name, last name, you can get hey what's your dog's name and customize your email to that.