There’s a time and a place to get up close and personal, so when you’re looking to personalise emails to customers and prospects it’s important that you don’t freak them out.

These days it seems common practice to send out a Hello John email but does anyone actually stop to think if they’re overdoing things. Maybe it’s just too much for someone to receive marketing collateral they haven’t requested when it seems you know just that little bit too much information about them.

Let’s take a closer look at personalisation – the good, the better and the downright creepy…

Personalisation – the good

Personalisation has a better track record when it comes to click through rates. It does what most emails were unable to do before — it makes the reader feel special. Being addressed by your first name at the beginning of an email makes you feel like you’re receiving an email from a friend, not a business hoping you will purchase their products or services.

Personalisation – the even better

In fact, higher click through rates aren’t the only benefit of email personalisation. It can also help you segment your email list because if you personalise your emails beyond first name and company to things like such as that special offer someone downloaded or a recent page they viewed on your website – then you can actually use this information to target your emails to cater for exactly what people on your database are looking for. Pretty cool huh!

Personalisation – the creepy!

But on the flip side – if you’re marketing to a group of people who you know may not be completely comfortable with personalisation, then it’s important you start off gently. Even if they’ve given you permission to market to them (because they filled out a form on your website), they can still get freaked out if you get over familiar too soon. Instead, ease them in gently – try to personalise around actions they’ve done on your website or the pages they visited.

Let’s face it – there’s a fine line between personalised email marketing for the good of the recipient and just being plain creepy. Understand the difference between being useful or over familiar and you’ll know if personalisation is really going to improve your campaign and get the right response.