Email marketing tips: approaching personalization correctly

Professional email marketers know that personalization is crucial in achieving high open rates as people are more likely to spend time reading things that are relevant to them.


Seeing their name on the subject line creates that impression of relevance and prompts them to read through the email to learn about how they can benefit from the content. This is the reason why full-featured auto-responders have become so popular among online business owners and internet marketers.


Auto-responders that automatically include a recipient’s name in the subject line and main text play a very important role in any email marketing campaign. It is these tools that make it easy for online business owners to personalize their emails and consequently get better responses. However, email marketing personalization can easily backfire.



Before you send out personalized emails to your mailing list, consider the limitations of your offerings as well as the profiles of your subscribers. If you’ve built your subscriber list well, you should have all the data you need to really personalize your emails.


Consider for a moment that you are a product vendor about to announce a promo that involves free shipping to any location within North America. In such a case, you shouldn’t just use your auto-responder to personalize your emails to your subscribers. Take the time to sift through your mailing list and send only to those who can actually avail of what you are offering (i.e. Those who live within North America).


Imagine what could happen if you addressed your recipients with their name on the subject line without taking the time to check if all are actually eligible to avail of your promo. You will end up exciting a number of your subscribers only to disappoint them in the end when they realize that your offer does not apply to them.


When it comes to email marketing personalization, you need to go the extra mile.


Personalization should not end in addressing your subscribers by their name — it should involve making sure that everything you send out is relevant to each recipient.


Keep in mind that no matter how informative your newsletter campaign is, it only takes one irrelevant email to give your subscribers an impression that reading through your messages is a waste of time.


For this reason, you should only use email personalization when you’re sure that the content you are sending is relevant to the recipient.

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