Merge tags
A tag is a hole in the sentence that each person's own details fall into. Write it once, and two hundred people read their own name.
The syntax
A tag is a field name wrapped in double colons. Write ::firstname:: in your message and each person receives their own first name in that spot. Nothing else about the sentence changes.
Hey ::firstname:: — thinking of you this week. Hope things at ::company:: have settled down.
Where the values come from
If you synced the macOS Address Book, the standard contact fields are available straight away — first name, last name, company and the other details you have filled in. If you imported a CSV, every column header in the file becomes a tag of the same name. A column called church gives you ::church::. There is no schema to set up and no mapping step.
When a field is empty
Somebody in every list is missing something. Rather than printing the raw tag or leaving a gap, Human RM substitutes the fallback you set — so a contact saved with no first name reads as “friend”, or whatever you would rather. The preview shows you every finished message before sending, and scanning it is the fastest way to find the three people whose data is thin.
Check the awkward ones by eye
Using them well
A tag should carry something you would have written anyway. A first name almost always earns its place. A city or a company often does. What does not work is inserting a detail purely to demonstrate that you hold the detail — people read “how are things in Leeds?” from someone who has never mentioned Leeds and correctly conclude a database is involved.
The best test is to read the finished message for three or four people in the preview and ask whether you would have sent exactly that to exactly them. If a tag makes a sentence stranger rather than warmer, take it out — the message reads better plain than personalised badly.