Making your subscribers feel that you are speaking directly to them—even if you design and send emails on a grand scale—is the best way to keep readers interested in your organization’s messages. This can be accomplished easily through the judicious use of personalization. There are many different ways to personalize, too. This paper will tell you all about the whys and hows.

It should be noted, however, that email marketing experts disagree about the value of personalization and how to best put it to use. For instance, Bruce C. Brown says that personalized subject lines used to lead to higher open rates, but this has changed. Why? Brown explains that spammers have become more likely to use this tactic. In one of his recent books, Brown notes that, for his part, he is now less likely to open a message with his own name in the subject line.¹ He suggests that personalization is best limited to the message greeting.

Dave Chaffey, on the other hand, is not nearly so opposed to any of a number of personalization options. He mentions the following as ways that messages can be tailored to individuals:²

1. You can set the salutation to include readers’ names, and/or use names within the message body
2. You can allow for users’ personal selections to tailor specific content
3. You can vary offers according to customers’ past behaviors and/or purchase history
4. Landing pages can be personalized if emails have been targeted for different segments
5. Personalize the subject line of a message with information of interest. As mentioned previously, spammers often use names in subject lines, which has diminished the effectiveness of this practice. HOWEVER, you could follow Amazon’s lead… they might announce a discount on historical novels as the subject—or in the header—of a message to someone who has shown a preference for this type of reading. 
6. Use demographics, like age, gender, and/or location. For example, send Caribbean cruise deals to someone living in a cold climate, send offers for lipstick samples to women, or send a coupon for Retirement Living magazine to people over the age of 55. 
7. Go by buying history. A good example is how iTunes recommends songs based on prior purchases.
8. Use names and a targeted message in your call to action. Instead of just saying “Forward to a Friend,” say something like “Susan, wouldn’t your best friend want to know about this book?”
9. Personalizing the overall content by offering customers content choices at signup.⁴ If you have already developed substantial mailing lists, you can still offer content choices to your current subscribers. Just develop your content options and invite existing subscribers to select them when you have set them up.

Points two, three, and four indicate that Chaffey considers user profile selections and segmentation to be methods of personalization. Indeed, they are: profile selections create a situation where subscribers self-select the types of information they get, and segmentation requires the use of individual subscribers’ personal data to tailor the content they receive. But other experts, like Brown, differentiate between segmentation, user content selection, and personalization more strictly, counting only the use of name data in addressing readers as personalization. We will treat personalization in broader terms for the purposes of this paper.

SOME OPTIONS AND EXAMPLES FOR PERSONALIZATION

Look at existing customer data (of which you will have at least email addresses, probably first and last names, and possibly more) and metrics (if any) and determine where personalizing may work best. 40% of marketers restrict personalization to the salutation. This is a good place to start, but make sure you also have a default greeting ready for readers whose names you may not have.

To revise or expand on Chaffey’s suggestions for personalization, consider also Simms Jenkins’s ideas:

INCLUDING PERSONAL USER DATA IN YOUR MESSAGE

Personalizing the header, salutation, and/or body of a message with individual users’ data is as easy as adding a simple token, or code, where you want the information to appear. Tokens can be added by hand before you upload your message to the system, but our newsletter editor provides a list of available tokens that you can click on to place them where you want them. To see token options, click on the ez.newsletter logo button at the top-right corner of the editor. The button looks like this:



The box that pops up contains tabs for three different kinds of tokens: personal, system, and order tokens. Here is the window as it appears, with personal tokens showing:



 

Simply place your cursor where you want a given type of information to appear and click on the corresponding token. Want the salutation to say “Dear Bob,”—or Barbara, or John? Place your cursor after the word “Dear” and click on the [--fname--] token. Want to include a statement of origin in your newsletter that reminds subscribers where and when they signed up for your mailing list? Write the statement and include referrer, referrer date, and/or referrer URL tokens in it.

System tokens, shown below, allow you to include information about the message subscription system. For instance, you may want to include a web address where readers can view your message, in case their email program will not display it properly. For that, you can add the [--problemsurl--] token. Tell-a-friend and unsubscribe tokens can also be found here. Legal compliance with the CAN-SPAM act requires that an unsubscribe option be included in all commercial messages. The token for it is [--optouturl--]. The [--optinurl--] token allows readers to forward the message to a friend in a way that will track the forward in the ez.newsletter system.





Order tokens allow you to automatically include information about individual customers’ online orders in the body of a message. These are extremely helpful when you are using automated messages to follow up with web sales. Here are some of the available order tokens:

 



These are fairly self-explanatory, and are based upon order records and item details as they are stored in your ez.newsletter account.

PERSONALIZATION THROUGH USER SELECTION

You can set up separate mailing lists for different kinds of mailings. Say, for instance, that your company sends out a monthly newsletter, coupons for online shopping, coupons for your bricks-and-mortar store, and highly-targeted announcements for customers with various specific interests. If the profiles option is enabled on your account, you can set list options to “external” and allow your subscribers to see and select what kinds of mailings they would like to receive.

If, for example, you run a sporting goods store, you might find that one customer may want online coupons and information about rock climbing equipment, while another wants to receive your newsletter and information about fishing and camping. When the readers select these options in their profiles, the will be added to those mailing lists and *only* those mailing lists. In this way, they self-select the information they get, effectively personalizing their own messages.

If your account is not currently set up for this kind of profile management and you’d like to know more about it, talk to your ez.newsletter represenative about making your account accommodate profile setup.

PERSONALIZATION THROUGH SEGMENTATION

Segmentation, or dividing a mailing list into multiple smaller lists based on various sets of criteria, can aid in personalization if you segment based on demographics, order histories, or interests expressed in clickthroughs. Segmentation will be discussed in greater detail in another white paper. Suffice it to say that it is easy to sort and separate email addresses into different lists on whatever basis you choose. Those lists will allow you to target mailings.




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1. The Complete Guide to Email Marketing by Bruce C. Brown.

2. Total Email Marketing by Dave Chaffey.

3. Salutations are often not used in newsletters, but Chaffey feels that they can and should be included in all customer communications. This could be effective. It's one of many aspects of email marketing that you can test with your readers.

4. The Truth About Email Marketing by Simms Jenkins

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