I don’t normally use an email marketing competitiors emails to show failures, but this one is a good one to have a discussion with you. When is personalization needed and not just something that gets thrown in. As you can see when you personalize and you do not have the data point in the CRM, it is simply a FAIL.

Now personalization can be a powerful medium, but when used as simply as “FIRSTNAME” it is weak sauce in my opinion. Would it really lift this newsletter by using my first name in a “Dear Dylan” (oops they did not have my firat name) scenario? Not likely from tests that I have tried before.

What would have been better was if they knew a releavant article or subject line to engage me with instead of JV personaliztion. This is a good example of why you can get into trouble with using it. When you have a small list it is easy to check and see, and even more relevant is that you need a back up plan for any data point that could possibly not exist in just one record. We often use a tactic of coming up with a generic word that would be inserted into any field or rule set that would populate data/elements if none exists.

Do you think that simple personalization works in a scenario like this? It is a newsletter. Something that you send to everyone, so why would my name make it better opened, read and clicked on?

Something to think about before you engage in your next campaign with data elements.