Breaking the generic email cycle: How marketers can personalize at scale

You know what I hate?

I hate getting generic, boring marketing emails from places I shop at.

It shouldn’t be happening.

Retailers should be personalizing those emails, tailoring them to me, their loyal customer.

After all, I’m sure they’ve collected enough data about me over the years to build a pretty good profile of who I am as a consumer.

This post is a bit of a rant.

Everyone I talk to believes that personalized marketing emails is the way to go.

Today I want to look at why personalization isn’t happening as much as everyone seems to believe it should.

And I want to offer a few ideas to help the makers of marketing emails break the generic mold.

The more personalized the email, the harder it is to create

Personalized emails are powerful; that’s why marketers want to create them.

But there’s a problem: The more personalized the email, the more technically challenging it is to create.

I see four levels of personalization, with technical difficulty rising as you move up the scale.

Level 1: Basic Personalization (First Name)

Level 1 of personalization happens when the email starts with the customer’s name.

In my case, that would be an email that starts with anything from a breezy ‘Hey, Brendan’ through to a very formal ‘Dear Mr. Farnand.’

The point is, the sender names me specifically, something that’s useful in creating and nurturing a relationship.

Level 1 personalization happens a lot because it’s not very difficult to do.

Level 2: Broad-Stroke Personalization

Level 2 involves using some general data you’ve collected about your customers to up the level of personalization.

That data might include simple information like a customer’s age, gender, country of residence and general interests.

This is what I call broad-stroke personalization, and it is more difficult to pull off than just adding a person’s name to the message because you need more data.

The problem with broad-stroke information is that it is often too vague to be helpful.

It’s not much to go on if all you know about a person is that they are a female living in Canada.

Level 3: Data-Driven Personalization

At Level 3, you up your personalization game by becoming more specific.

That might mean being able to target not just the country of the email recipient, but their city.

It also means being able to provide information in the language they use. You’ll get better results with potential clients in, say, Portugal if you send them material in Portuguese.

But to bring your game to Level 3 you need quite a lot of data – more than you need for Level 2. You also need the ability to analyze it and act on the analysis.

To be able to give people content in the language they prefer is, as far as I’m concerned, an important part of personalization.

So you not only have to know what language the customer prefers, but you also need to be able to provide content in that language that is colloquial and error-free. There are plenty of translation horror stories out there; you don’t want your email to be one of them.

That’s why getting to Level 3 of personalization is not easy.

Level 4: Hyper-Personalization

Level 4 is what I call hyper-personalization. You can’t hyper-personalize without an awful lot of granular data – things like a person’s purchase history, their preferences, all the way down to their shoe size. It’s not just ‘Hey Brendan,’ it’s ‘Hey Brendan, there are golf shoes in your size on sale at a store near you. We think you’ll be interested because we know you’re a golfer.’

That’s the kind of marketing email that really gets a consumer’s attention.

It’s also the hardest to pull off. That’s because there’s a right way to hyper-personalize, and there’s a wrong way.

I recently bought a year’s supply of staples online. What happened? The retailer decided I’m a staples guy and started flooding me with emails about staples.

Sorry, but that’s not helpful. I won’t need staples for another year!

Stumbling blocks to personalization

Every single marketer I meet wants to personalize the emails they send out. They also know generic content sucks. But they blast out generic content anyway.

Why?

The biggest stumbling block I see is the lack of technical ability to convert the data the companies collect into usable personalized messaging.

People say, ‘Yeah, we have a lot of data, but it’s trash.’

They complain that the data they have is not organized, or that the marketing team isn’t able to get any useful insights from what they have.

Others point out that the data marketing would find useful is actually collected by another department. And marketing doesn’t have access to it because it lives in a database in another part of the company with another administrator.

In other words, companies often don’t personalize because they lack the technical ability to turn data that has been collected into metrics that marketers can use.

Lack of access to decent translation has often come up as an excuse not to personalize.

And another excuse I often hear is that the data the need keeps changing, that it’s a moving target.

A mobile phone provider, for example, has to contend with the fact that its customers are buying new phones, or purchasing new plans for their phones, or they’ve just paid off their phone, or they’ve become eligible for an upgrade. There are a lot of moving pieces to keep track of.

That’s certainly valid, but it’s important to remember that not everything about a business’s customers is in flux.

A person’s first name is not very likely to change over time, nor is the language they prefer to be served in.

A person’s place of residence generally won’t change often, and people age in a predictable way.

So some details are fairly static and others change slowly or seldom; the real issue is with those details that shift often.

The dangers of not personalizing

Companies often find they aren’t able to execute personalization with any kind of scale, or streamline the process. So they just don’t do it.

There are dangers, however, in not taking action.

Getting a generic, boring marketing email that is not relevant to me is at best a waste of my time. Getting them repeatedly creates annoyance and frustration.

All that ends up tarnishing the brand.

Where I’m going with this

The problems in campaign creation these days are rarely about strategy; they’re more about how to scale, and how to boost outcomes.

Personalization boosts outcomes; that’s why it’s such a relevant issue right now.

We know that personalization requires a lot of technical resources.

We know that the companies that do it well are throwing a lot of resources at it, while the companies that don’t have the resources and the technical ability to do targeted messages simply don’t do it.

My message for marketers is this: You know personalized messaging works, so do what you can to get access to the data you need. Find ways around the technical difficulties.

Increasingly, and in particular with AI, those ways exist.

Our mission at Knak has always been about making marketing accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical abilities. And now with KnakAI it’s becoming possible to overcome the technical barriers to personalization.

So marketers looking to personalize shouldn’t be stymied by technical issues.

Instead, they should be thinking about products, services and tools (like KnakAI) that can help them personalize at scale.

Don’t be intimidated by the technical stuff. Find solutions that work for you. We can be one of them.