Personalized Email Is About More Than Just Technology

Email Personalisation is always a hot topic in email marketing &, if you ever do an A/B test on this, you’ll see a personal email will come back better in almost every situation.

Some email marketers misunderstand ‘personal’ though - they look at it from a technical point of view & think “personalised email is an email where you automatically insert the name of the recipient”. In actual fact, it’s not just that… in reality, if you send out generic ‘press release’ style emails, hastily shoving your recipients’ names into the top often makes them look less personal. Here are a couple of examples:

How not to personalise an email

How to personalise an email

Which is more personal?

It has very little to do with the name, right? if you drop the ‘Dear John’ from the second example, it’s still way more personal.

6 Tips To Writing Personal Emails

If your emails look like the first example, here are a couple of tips for better results:

1. Remember you’re actually trying to get information across to someone
2. Read your email out loud. If it sounds ridiculous, you’re on the wrong track
3. Count the number of personal pronouns (I, we, you, he, she, they) & possessive pronouns (your, our, my, mine, …) If the number is zero, you probably haven’t got the balance quite right. eg. in the ‘good’ example above, there are 5 personal/possessive pronouns)
4. Try to avoid copycat emails that follow your competitors’ formats: chances are they could be just copying the competition too
5. If you don’t already have them, put together some ‘personas’ describing your ideal customers & write with them in mind
6. Do some split testing & find out what works for your readers