Abstract
- Evolution of personalization. Email personalization is not a binary toggle; it is a slider that scales constantly to reflect the expansion of personalization opportunities.
- Technical hurdles. Achieving a high level of personalization is difficult due to technical limitations, data silos, and legacy systems, but it is essential to marketing success.
- Continuous improvement. Like many digital marketing trends, personalization is a gradual process of advancement, with opportunities to improve performance quarterly and annually.
Email personalization has been a major priority for marketers for over a decade. Oracle Digital Experience Agency's Annual Email In his marketing research, personalization has been in the top three trends in terms of both adoption and impact in all five years he has conducted the research. This finding is echoed by many other studies, all of which show that marketers are putting a lot of effort into using subscriber data to make campaigns more personalized and relevant. It shows that.
You may be able to respond to this long-term trend by considering one of two things.
- Well, personalization is always a good investment that pays off.
- Well, personalization is obviously very difficult to do. If not, we as an industry will move on to other priorities.
When I recently spoke with Rob Voase, host of the Everyone Hates Your Brand podcast, the latter was top of mind for him. he asked me:
Why is personalization so hard to get right? Poor data? Is it a legacy system? Is it just too much trouble to do it? Why does personalization continue to be at the top of your to-do list?
These are all great questions, but let's start with the last one. Because that's the core of the problem.
Email personalization: Is it always a priority?
I don't think of personalization as a switch, so I don't think this is a failure. It's not about whether your email is personalized or not. This is a slider with various personalization opportunities.
So some emails may end up with zero personalized content at all. Depending on the message and its purpose, this may be perfectly fine. 10 other messages, on the other hand, can be significantly personalized based on demographic, geographic, psychographic, corporate, and other information. With over 170 attributes identified that can be used for personalization and segmentation efforts, the possibilities are vast.
But it's even more complex because the slider is constantly growing in size as we acquire new technical and operational capabilities. For example, 20 years ago it was probably just a 3-point slider. Most emails did not include personalization. Transactional emails were highly personalized (by the standards of the time). And in between, broadcast emails with personalized first names became all the rage. That's about it.
Fast forward to today and it's probably a 30 point slider. Now, first name personalization is an empty gesture unless backed up with deeper personalization that shows you really know your subscribers. Personalization by loyalty level, recommended products based on past purchases and views, recommended content and help articles based on app activity, and more are all possibilities.
And next year the personalization slider could go up to 31 or 32, so the competition continues. And in the following year, it goes up even more as our overall abilities grow. In short, email personalization is a trend that is likely to remain at the top of marketers' priority lists for years to come, not because it's a failure on their part, but because it opens up new opportunities for success.
Related Article: Email Marketing Trends That Are Adopting and Successful
The personalization challenge: data or legacy systems?
The pattern is that personalization at the middle and lower end of the spectrum becomes easier over time, while the new upper end of the spectrum almost always becomes more complex. They tend to require new technology, help getting up and running, process changes, and increased access to data. These new possibilities are always exciting and stimulating.
For example, some brands are now dreaming of using generative AI to send fully personalized email campaigns to their customers and prospects. At the same time, most of the time the data is confusing. It's siled into different systems across the organization. It's full of contradictory data. And sharing that data across the organization is slow and often limited. The challenge is even greater for brands with outdated legacy systems, especially those with home-grown systems.
As always, when bad data comes in, bad intelligence goes out. This hinders not only personalization efforts, but also segmentation, automation, and omnichannel orchestration efforts. This is one of the main reasons why so many companies are implementing customer data platforms. A customer data platform aggregates and cleans all customer data across your organization and makes it available in real-time to all connected systems.
Related article: Machine Learning and Generative AI in Marketing: Key Differences
Tired of email personalization?
Given the technical hurdles to achieving the highest level of personalization, some people have thrown up their hands in frustration and suggested that personalization in general is not worth it. All the research I've seen and all the client experiences we've had suggests the opposite.
Note that personalization is not a switch. The question is not whether to personalize at the highest and most sophisticated level or not at all. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, so keep looking for personalization that is actionable and makes an impact in your organization, even if it's at a lower level than what other brands are doing.
Even if not optimized, personalization is significantly better than a one-size-fits-all approach. For example, some brands have become skittish about using send time optimization (STO) after email privacy protections overshadowed many open signals. However, the updated STO model will improve send times even if it is slower to adapt to changes in subscriber engagement times because the STO engine now incorporates clicks and eliminates auto-opens from Apple. is significantly better than manually selecting the .
Related article: 5 Biggest Changes in a Decade of Email Marketing Changes
Many other trends are also in the slider
While some email marketing trends like BIMI are either in place or not, most trends are similar to email personalization and exist on a spectrum. We've already talked about segmentation, automation, lifecycle messaging, and omnichannel orchestration. Email deliverability issues are also a variety of issues and strategies. Obviously, the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and generative AI is a slider. Email design issues such as inclusive design and mobile friendly design are also sliders that have evolved over time.
With all these trends, your brand is on a journey of self-improvement. Don't expect perfection, expect and plan for continuous improvement. Thankfully, with personalization and many other digital marketing trends, there are plenty of opportunities to improve from quarter to quarter and year to year.
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