A Rant On Email (De-)Personalization
December 1st, 2008
I have an AOL email account I use for almost everything that isn’t related to work. It gets flooded with newsletters and advertising (and spam) pretty quickly.
The account had approximately 1,400 emails in it the other morning. As I was trying to delete enough junk to get below 1,000 (which always feels like something of a major accomplishment), I noticed that for all the talk about “personalization” in online marketing generally and email marketing specifically, a subject line with my name in it was a sure indication that the email could be safely deleted. A few samples:
“Craig Peters: Amazon.com’s Black Friday Deals”
“Craig, You’re Invited…”
“PETERS, someone has sent you a Subway sandwich Gift Card”
I can’t help but think that there are a lot of marketers in a lot of companies thinking, “let’s do all the heavy lifting required to make sure we personalize our emails by using the customer’s name in the subject line.”
And there are probably a lot of other marketers thinking, “yeah, that’s a great idea, people will really think that we’re thinking about them.”
And the results are the sort of subject lines you see above.
But is that worthwhile personalization? That Amazon subject line above is a great example: It might as well say, “Occupant: Amazon.com’s Black Friday Deals.”
Of course Amazon is probably A/B testing more subject lines than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.
Still, when the presence of “personalization” in the subject line is a clear indication that the email is junk, there’s a disconnect somewhere, don’t you think?
Is it really “personalization” when all you’re doing is plugging my first or last name into the same spot as everyone else’s first or last name? Shouldn’t “personalization” mean something more than that? Wouldn’t Amazon be better off with a call to action like “Check out Amazon.com’s Great Black Friday Deals” instead of some sort of bogus attempt to pretend they know me?
They don’t know me, they know how to pull my name out of a database and plug it into a hole in the subject line.
Think of it this way: When your closest friends and business associates send you an email, how often do they use your first or last name in the subject line?
In the online marketing world, conversational typically trumps corporate. This bit of conversation, though, feels like bumping into the loudmouth insurance agent at the party who, drink in one hand, throws his arm around your shoulder and with aggressive faux-friendliness says far too loudly, “Craig, my friend! How the hell are ya?”
No one needs “personalization” like that.
Takeaway for marketers: Slapping a name from a database into a subject line isn’t personalization.
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Craig,
Saw your question on LinkedIn and figured I would check out what fellow Colgate alumni are doing in the marketing world. This post is interesting because the company I co-founded, Sympact, is doing something about personalization in email, beyond the absurdity of doing mail merges with first names.
Fandango wanted to offer their email list only movie showtimes that were geo and time sensitive. So we leveraged our technology to create individual, dynamic images based on the time and place oft the email’s opening. We offered up these showtimes and then plotted the local theaters on a google map (less useful, but very cool looking). The result was a 20% improvement in revenues and 33% improvement in clicks. The moral is that personalization works when there’s utility.
A/B testing is not enough, email and display marketing should be delivering 1 unique impression for 1 individual and we have the technology to deliver that granularity. This down market will only increase the adoption of these highly scalable and cheap personalization tools, IMHO.
Great to hear smart points of view from other Colgate grads. Go Gate!