I think that I have this discussion in some manner each and every week. The question is either should we personalize our emails and if so does personalization work? Well I can go either way on this depending on what you choose to do with personalization. At times personalization with a name seems almost spam-ish when it is done poorly or used as an afterthought of throwing it into a sentence or the greeting of an email.

But the examples I have to share actually do work IMHO. Now notice that these two email creatives are exactly the same. There is only ONE difference that I can find between the two and this is the subject line. As they arrived in my inbox back to back, the subject lines stood out. They did not use my name but they use eROI in the subject line and wrote the copy differently. They got me. It stopped me and made me want to open it more. It felt not personalized, but relevant. And I think that the discussion around personalization should actually be changed to one of relevance.

When data, copy or images are personalized in some manner that stands out and grabs your attention it is not a true factor of personalization but actually one of relevance with the subscriber. This leads me to challenge you to change the conversation you might be having with your team, vendors and in the end your email subscribers. Think about how you can use subtle changes to data to make an impact. Think about what you can do to make them stop, of only for a moment, in a cluttered inbox to take that next step of opening and clicking through to learn more about your offers.

It is time to change the questions in everything we have known this far in email and time to start talking to people in a way that will make them think about your emails.