Editorial
The Gist
- Personalization evolution. Email personalization is not a binary toggle but a slider with a constantly expanding scale, reflecting the growing range of personalization opportunities.
- Technological hurdles. Achieving advanced personalization is challenging due to technological limitations, data silos, and legacy systems, but it's crucial for marketing success.
- Continual improvement. Personalization, like many digital marketing trends, is a journey of incremental progress, with opportunities to enhance performance every quarter and year.
Email personalization has been a major priority for marketers for well over a decade. In Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s annual Email Marketing Survey, personalization has been among the top three trends in terms of both adoption and impact for all five years that we’ve done the survey. This finding is echoed by lots of other surveys, all of which indicate marketers putting significant effort into using their subscriber data to make their campaigns significantly more individually relevant.
You might react to this long-term trend by thinking one of two things:
- Wow, personalization is perennially a good investment that pays off.
- Yikes, personalization is clearly really difficult to execute on, otherwise we’d be moving on to other priorities as an industry.
When I recently spoke with Everyone Hates Your Brand podcast host Rob Voase, the latter was top of mind for him. He asked me:
What is it that is so hard to get right about personalization? Is it poor data? Is it legacy systems? Is it just too much hassle to do it? Why does personalization seem to be continually on the top of the list of things to do?
Those are all great questions, but let’s start with the last one, because that one gets at the core of the issue.
Email Personalization: Always a Priority?
I don’t see this as a failure because I don’t see personalization as a toggle. It’s not that your emails are personalized or they’re not. It’s a slider with a range of possible personalization opportunities.
So, some of your emails might be a 0, containing no personalized content whatsoever. Depending on the message and its goal, that might be totally fine. Meanwhile, other messages might be a 10, with considerable personalization based on demographic, geographic, psychographic, firmographic and other information. We’ve identified more than 170 attributes that can be used for personalization and segmentation efforts, so the possibilities are vast.
But it’s even more complicated than that, because the scale of the slider is constantly expanding as we gain new technological and operational capabilities. For instance, 20 years ago, it was probably just a 3-point slider. Most emails contained no personalization; transactional emails were highly personalized (by the standards of the time); and then, in between, we had broadcast emails with first-name personalization, which was all the rage. That’s about it.
Flash forward to today and it’s probably a 30-point slider. Now, first-name personalization is a hollow gesture unless you’re backing that up with much deep personalization that demonstrates that you really know the subscriber. Personalizing with loyalty level, recommended products based on past purchases and browsing, recommended content and help articles based on app activity, and on and on are all possibilities.
And the race continues because next year the personalization slider may go to 31 or 32. And the year after that even further, as our collective capabilities grow. So, email personalization is a trend that may stay at the top of marketers’ priority lists for years to come because of new opportunities for success opening up, rather than any failure on the part of marketers.
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Related Article: The Email Marketing Trends That Are Seeing Adoption & Success
Personalization Challenges: Data or Legacy Systems?
The pattern is that personalization at the middle and lower end of the spectrum gets easier over time, but the newer, top-end of the spectrum is almost always complicated. It tends to require new technology, assistance to get up and running, process changes and greater access to data. These new possibilities are always inspiring and exciting.
For instance, some brands are currently dreaming of using generative AI to send 100% individualized email campaigns to their customers and prospects. At the same time, in most cases, their data is a mess. It’s siloed in different systems across their organizations. It’s full of conflicting data. And sharing that data across the organization is slow and often limited. For brands with outdated legacy systems — and especially anything homegrown — the challenges are even bigger.
As always, bad data in equals bad intelligence out. This is not only impeding personalization efforts, but segmentation, automation and omnichannel orchestration efforts, too. This is one of the major reasons why so many businesses are implementing customer data platforms, which aggregate all customer data across an organization, clean it and make it available in real-time to all systems that are connected to it.
Related Article: Machine Learning and Generative AI in Marketing: Critical Differences
Too Much Hassle to Do Email Personalization?
Given the technological hurdles to achieving top-of-the-spectrum personalization, some folks are throwing up their hands in frustration and suggesting that personalization in general isn’t worthwhile. All of the research I’ve seen and all the client experiences we’ve had suggest the opposite.
Remember that personalization isn’t a toggle. The question isn’t whether to do personalization at the highest and most sophisticated level or not at all. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, so continue to explore personalization that’s doable at your organization and generates lift, even if it’s at a lower level than what some other brands might be doing.
Even done sub-optimally, personalization is dramatically better than one-size-fits-all approaches. For example, in the wake of Mail Privacy Protection obscuring many open signals, some brands soured on using send time optimization (STO). But updated STO models are still significantly better than manually picking send times, even if STO engines are now slower to adapt to changes in subscriber engagement times because they now incorporate clicks and screen out auto-opens from Apple.
Related Article: The 5 Biggest Changes From a Decade of Email Marketing Change
Many Other Trends Are Also on a Slider
While some email marketing trends like BIMI are either in place or not, most trends are like email personalization and exist on a spectrum. I’ve already mentioned segmentation, automation and lifecycle messaging and omnichannel orchestration. Issues around email deliverability are a spectrum of issues and strategies, too. Clearly, the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and generative AI is a slider. And even email design issues like inclusive design and mobile-friendly design are sliders that have evolved over time.
With all of these trends, your brand is on a journey of self-improvement. Don’t expect perfection, but do expect and plan for continual improvement. Thankfully, with personalization and so many other digital marketing trends, there are lots of opportunities to get better every quarter and every year.
Breaking Barriers: Overcoming Challenges in Email Personalization
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