Due to the increasing number of spam messages, recipients are inclined to block all marketing emails. To face this reality, email marketers are moving away from the ‘batch and blast’ emails and are turning towards sending more personalized messages (also see blog post on the Future of Email Marketing ). Personalized emails can establish a one-to-one relationship with the recipient. The main benefit of personalization is the fact that it leads to higher performance in key metrics (open rates, click-through rates, etc.).

Personalization of email messages can be done in several ways:

First of all you can use the name of the recipient in the greeting or the subject line. This is an easy way to address your email directly to a specific recipient. Make sure that your database is up to date and that the necessary obvious checks have been done. I don’t know anyone named “info”, “contact” or “noreply”…

Secondly, the content of email messages can be personalized in several ways. Geographical, behavioral, demographic and transactional targeting enable to speak to the interest of the recipient. The better the database is segmented, the more targeted and personal the email message can be.

Finally, a salutation of the sender (for instance a picture of the Head of Sales with a personal note) can also help to establish a personal relationship with the recipient. From our own experience, we can assure that personalization in email messages frequently has a positive influence on the key metrics. I say ‘frequently’ because this is not always the case. Optimization campaigns (multivariate testing and optimization) have shown that there is a difference between a B2C market and a B2B environment. In fact, adding a salutation of the sender is not affecting the click-through rate in B2C email messages. In some cases, the contrary is true.

To summarize: personalization leads to an increase in return-on-investment, but to be sure if this is valid for your target group: test it.

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