Dear !*FIRSTNAME*! Readers
Like many email marketers, you might be tempted to personalize your email campaigns with the first names of your recipients. On the surface, it seems logical that if someone sees their first name in a salutation, they will feel that they have a relationship with the sender. Unfortunately, unless you actually have a relationship with the recipient, they might actually consider it smarmy, presumptuous or even downright spammy of you.
Stephanie Miller of ReturnPath shares some insights about the slippery slope of getting too personal with your recipients.
“…Assuming too much familiarity too early in the relationship may have the reverse affect intended. Consumers may be off put by the forwardness, and tune out this message and all others to come. This is especially risky early in the relationship. Be careful with personalized salutations in welcome messages, as well. If the subscriber has only provided name and email address to sign up for email newsletters, then there is not much of a relationship there yet. Once you’ve earned the relationship (e.g.: after a purchase), then personalization may be more welcome…” keep reading
Of course, personalization done correctly can be very effective. It’s just important to think about the value of the personalization that you are providing. Rather than trying to misrepresent your relationship to your recipients by using their given name, think about ways that you can personalize the content for each recipient – to personalize their experience with you based on their actual needs and preferences. And in order to do that, you actually have to spend some time getting to know them first.
Lovingly Best regards
Your friend Tom
Let’s face it, not everyone fills in email subscription forms completely. Often, subscribers either don’t take the time required to enter all fields that you have on your form or simply don’t want to share personal information with you. This can make it difficult to personalize emails to your list. When not everyone on your list has a first name entered, for example, using merge fields in your salutation will result in an unprofessional message for those recipients who don’t have a first name entered.
If I get a message that reads, Dear ______, then I feel like a number. Sure, I know that most of the email marketing messages that I receive aren’t personal, and that even if they do include my first name, they don’t actually know me. But there is a psychological impact when a warm greeting is used in the salutation.
So how do you use personalization effectively when your list contains some entries with names and others without (or some with cities and some without?)
GroupMail users can use merge scripts instead of merge fields for personalizing messages to groups that contain incomplete fields. In the example below, I created a test group with one recipient with a first name and another without a first name. See the results below.
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You can do the same for any database fields associated with your list that you want to personalize. Convert blank city fields to “your city” so that a personalized message that reads “Big things are happening in Bellingham” for those from Bellingham who took the time to add their city data will read “Big things are happening in your city” for those who didn’t enter thier city in your database.
YOUR DATABASE IS THE CORNERSTONE of your email strategy. It simply isn’t possible to communicate with your audience unless you have a database with details of your contacts. Regardless of what database you use to store contact information, it is important to think of its functionality when populating it with content. Simply having a database full of email addresses is useless if you want to personalize your messages to groups of recipients. To use your database effectively for personalized email messages, there are two main issues to consider; namely; field separation and data style.
Think Personalization!
When adding data to your contact database, it is important to think how that data will be used when communicating via email. The most common field used in email personalization is the ‘First Name’ field. But there are many other ways to personalize effectively beyond using someone’s name in your message. To most effectively personalize email messages, it is important to separate fields and input data strategically with email communication in mind. It is also important to think about the style of data that you put into each field…
To read the full article, go to Designing Databases to Support Email Personalization
