• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, June 1, 2016

Last week's debacle at Britain's Labour Party underscored a hugely important point for email marketers across the globe -- personalisation is far more than a name. While the main opposition party in the UK was ridiculed for putting "Dear First Name" at the start of an email asking signed-up supporters to donate to a campaign to remain in the EU, there are still many brands out there that will smirk and think they've got it right. However, just because you don't make the mistake of putting "First Name" and always get the actual name right, that doesn't mean your job is over. 

Getting to know a customer and personalising email is much more than just knowing their first name. However, that's as far as many organisations go, as i was speaking with Jenna Tiffany, lead digital marketing strategist at email marketing agency Communicator, who is also a hub member of the DMA Email Council.

"There's a lot of legacy systems hindering the progress brands want to make," she says. "They want to personalise emails, but it requires a real long-term effort. So a lot will get as far as getting the name right on the email and stopping there because it's a quick win. The much harder work is in breaking down the silos and getting a fuller understanding of the customer throughout their entire journey."

This, of course, is the hard part -- and requires long-term strategic thinking and a lot of integration work to provide a single view of the customer. In Tiffany's opinion, however, it's well worth it, because otherwise email will just languish in the bad old days.

"There's a perception of email as just being this high-volume channel to pump stuff out through, which has led to issues such as declining response rates," she says. "Email marketers can turn that around by getting a complete view of the customer as they go through their customer journey. If you get it right, you can use behavioural and transactional data to personalise offers and get the right message in front of people at the right time. We're definitely finding open rates go above the industry average when we start really personalising email. In fact, we've even seen some rates go up to between 21% and 42%, which is very gratifying and shows the difference true personalisation can make."