Personalize emails

[Supermu]

I want to send an email to many contacts. it should appear to the receiver as if I only sent it to him/her,

to field: abc@xyz.com
from field: jespmark@etc.com
body: dear first_name <--------------- this is the bit I cannot get to work
blah blah

is that possible? I've tried templates, but the received email has all the recipients in the to field, and the "dear name" I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do.... Someone suggest $contact_name, but sadly all emails have the first contact name in the list of recipients.

I've looked at Mail merge. This does not appear to be what I want...

Someone please please please help me.... I need this functionality so badly, and I have spent days trying to figure it out.

TIA
Jesper

[sugarcane]

Hi Jesper,

when you use the email templates, it only populates the variable with the first person's information. Everyone else essentially gets a copy. To have the variables each populate for each individual Lead/Contact, you will need to use the campaigns module.

You can look at the Marketing tab of Sugar University for information on how to set up the campaign.