Can you have too much personalization?

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on July 08, 2008

There's nothing more satisfying than spreading a little chaos into our comfortable world of truisms and generalizations.

Only last week we discovered subject line length might be more complicated than we thought. And today it's the turn of personalization. Oh happy day.

Thanks to reader Todd Sweet for alerting me to some intriguing research work at the College of Business at the University of Illinois.

In the original research paper*, the authors examined how the presence of personal data in a commercial email influences clickthrough intentions.

Common sense suggests that, for example, incorporating the recipient's location in the email ought to boost results by connecting more with the reader:

"Dear Mark,

As a resident of Austria, you'll love our..."

Essentially, the researchers discovered that such use of personal data in a commercial email can have a negative impact where there is no clear justification for it.

They write: "Higher personalization appears to reduce effectiveness when the customer is given no reason for why their personal information is being used."

Further research showed that there was more tolerance for this kind of disconnect where the email had more value to the recipient.

Here are the lessons I took away:

1. Displaying a recipient's personal information just for the sake of it can backfire: recipients may feel threatened.

2. If you do display personal data, only do so where there is an explicit connection between this data and the email's content. Like this:

"As a resident of Vienna, we'd like to invite you to the opening of our new store in the 7th district."

3. The more useful your emails, the more recipients tolerate sub-optimal practices.

Most important:

4. Personalization is more about tailoring your email's content based on what you know about the recipient (demographics, past clickthrough behavior, purchase records etc.) and less about showing off to recipients how much you know about them.

But as always, don't take anybody's word for it: test your list to see what works for you.

*White, T.B. et al (2008) Market Lett. 19:39-50

Tags: email marketing, email personalization

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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