Email personalisation means adapting content to a specific recipient. Addressing them by name is its simplest and least effective form, and with faulty data it can even do harm – a blank salutation or a typo in the name looks worse than a neutral greeting. Real impact comes from personalisation based on behaviour and history: a recommendation building on a previous purchase, a reminder about consumable material at the time it is running out, or content that differs by customer segment. The precondition is clean, connected data, which in practice tends to be the biggest obstacle. Before introducing personalisation it is therefore worth checking data quality and having a fallback version of the text ready for cases when a piece of data is missing. The effect is measured by comparison with a non-personalised version, because simply inserting a piece of data into the text does not by itself guarantee a higher response rate or higher revenue.
See also: Database segmentation, RFM segmentation, Data quality in analytics.
