Opening an email from the famous Drayton Bird a while back I found this…

You know what a USP is, don’t you, NAME ?

I suspect “NAME?” is the place where “Tony” should be, but the personalisation went wrong.

Which raises the question – does personalisation within the text of an email actually work?

Personalisation started out as a direct mail trick – the idea being that you, the reader, might believe that I, the sender, was writing to your personally. It worked at that level for about 6 months before everyone got the hang of it, and the novelty faded away.

Occasionally personalisation in DM works – but only when very carefully integrated into the text. So a letter that says, “We’ve been looking at car insurance prices in Corby and I’ve just noticed how high these are compared with surrounding towns,” can work. If you live in Corby you might think, “oh this is for me” – or at the very least “this is relevant to me”. You might suspect that the word Corby is just mail merged in, but still, it seems like this could be something word reading if they are offering cheaper car insurance in your town.

However when I got an email saying “We’ve been looking at car insurance prices in Great Oakley and I’ve just…” I was dubious. I live in Great Oakley and it is a small village with no shop or pub. The notion that anyone would examine the car insurance rates in a small community like that is just bizarre.

So personalisation can work, but you have to be very careful about it. Not least because it is not just what you do, which affects readers’ reactions to the issue, but also what others do.

About six months ago I got a letter that said that the company had undertaken a survey of the prices of insurance “in Great Oakley, Corby” which is just plain weird. (Great Oakley = village, peaceful, small, church, village hall, two duck ponds, river, while Corby, although near by is town with a cement works, steel works, large industrial estates and a significant Scottish community unlike the community in nearby Great Oakley.)

To return to emails, you might be personalising correctly, but the fact that Drayton Bird got it so wrong (at least in writing to me, and so I suspect in writing to some other people too) means that others might be put off by any email that uses the trick.

Worse, most databases contain mistakes. This is because most data entry people are not paid very well (some are paid for each entry put on line) and the measurement of the accuracy of their work is whether emails or direct mail get delivered or not.

For this reason I find mail to me addressed to Tony Atwood (wrong spelling of my surname), Mr Tony (first name on the surname line), and (most hilariously) Mr House Mailings (part of the company name entered on the surname line).

I also get Anthony Attwood (which is correct, but the only place I am ever called Anthony is on formal documents – and so “Dear Anthony” just screams to me that this data has been lifted from Companies’ House.

The problem is that we all of us tend to notice these things – and so every time there is a mistake it damages the company or the sender. It is not ideal but not 100% disastrous if a slip occurs in a mailing address, providing the mail is delivered. But when you start playing with people’s names you are on trickier territory.

To compensate for this, personalisation would have to have a major impact on the people who get personalised messages where there is no mistake. I am not at all sure it does much of the time.

There are of course exceptions – for example when writing to schools that don’t hand out the personal email address of the teachers we email the general school address but strip in the name of the teacher in the subject line – and that does up the response rate dramatically.

But generally, personalising emails is something to be looked at with caution.

If you would like to know more about our services for emailing consumers, businesses or teachers in schools, please do have a look at www.yesmail.co.uk – or give me a call on 01536 399 013

Tony Attwood (two t’s!)