Most of the time on a sign up form I ask for the first name and primary email.

I want their first name so I can personalize emails I send out and, by doing so, increase response. (Using a name will make you more money.)

Sometimes–whether by intention or accident–subscribers leave the name field blank or put their email address into the name field.

Yet you already know that having personalization in your email messages will increase click-throughs and profits.

Here’s a simple way I use to get more names for my subscribers.

About once a month I log in to my Aweber.com account and go to the “Search Leads” screen for my newsletter list.

First I search for everyone who put an email address in the “name” field when they signed up.

To do this I choose “name” in the first box, “contains” in the middle box and “@” in the third box. Because email addresses all contain an “@”, this will give me a list of all the people who have an email address as their “name.”

When you get the list you will find there are several types of email addresses showing up in the name field.

For some the email address will contain an obvious name: JohnJDoe@aol.com. In those cases I change the “name” field to their name “John Doe”.

In some cases the email address will contain a nick name: Butterfly@aol.com. In those cases I change the “name” field to the nick name “Butterfly”.

In some cases the email address will contain a business name: OnlineBowTies@aol.com. In those cases I change the “name” field to the business name, making the “first” name something appealing based on their business name. In the example I have above I would use “Bowties” rather than “Online Bow Ties” because the first name is typically what I use to personalize emails.

Sometimes the email address will contain some sort of “tracking” the subscriber is using to see where the email is coming from. An example would be FullTiltBlogging@theirdomain.com. I leave these types of email addresses unchanged as some of these people are using tracking to make sure they read my emails.

In some cases the email address in the “name” field will not have any distinguishable name: Bridges@aol.com. In those cases I strip off the “@aol.com” part and just make it the initial part of the email: “Bridges”.

Once I have completed finding the subscribers using email addresses as names, I move on to find those email addresses with no names.

To do this I go back to my search box. In the first box I choose “name”, in the second box I choose “is” and the third box I leave blank. This will show all of the subscribers who haven’t used their name when they subscribe.

Finding a name for these folks might be a little harder, but you can use a couple strategies to put a name with the email.

In some cases the email address will tell you the name. If so, put that name in the “name” field.

If you aren’t lucky enough to have a name as a part of the email address, you can use the first part of the email address—the part before the “@”—as the name for your subscriber.

Surprisingly, even though I get a several email subscriptions every day (20-25), I only have a few each month where the name field isn’t a name or is blank. Put this to work on your own list and it will increase the number of people who respond to your offers.