You can absolutely personalize emails using your contact list properties.
Ensure your contact list properties are setup. For more information on setting up your contact properties, please read the Email Personalization Guide.
Create a new campaign as usual, and select a template.
On the design page, click within the text box and place your cursor where you want to add the personalized text. Then click on ‘Variables’ from the menu.
Select the desired contact property. For this example, the contact property “firstname” will be selected.
In the ‘Default value’ box enter the text that you want to be displayed if there is no data for the property of that contact. Then click ‘Insert’.
For this campaign, if there is no first name for a contact, the default text ‘there’ will be used.
Now let’s see the personalization feature in action:
For a recipient with a first name stored in the contact property,
And for a recipient with no first name: