Yes! There can be a disconnect between the email personalization companies think they deliver and what people actually receive.
Customer-first companies invest significant resources in customer insight research, to know their customers better than their customers know themselves.
Big discrepancies exist between how marketing teams go about building and maintaining buyer personas. And generally, larger companies can deploy way more resources into personas, segmentation, and go-to-market strategy than small businesses.
But even startups and small businesses almost certainly can figure out who they're trying to communicate with, why someone should care about their message, and how to add value to that person's day.
Besides looking to your prospects and customers for surveys and interviews, sales, customer success, and product managers should also have input that helps you better understand the motivations and behaviors of your core buyer personas.
In B2B technology, we look for each buyer persona to have consensus around identifiers, goals, challenges, how your company can help, and common barriers.
And the strategy is an important first step, but it's just that; the beginning.
Next, your CRM or marketing automation platform, or whatever you're using for email marketing, must have great attention paid to properties/fields that support segmenting your messages at the absolute minimum by buyer persona and lifecycle stage. In other words, who that person is and where that person is in their journey with your company.
If you did nothing else besides better segmentation (by persona and lifecycle stage) and created personalized messaging to those two facets/dimensions, your messages will get a massive lift in perceived relevancy and value.
You'll know this is working when your delivery rate, open rate, click-through rates, and conversion rates all start looking healthier. (And the complaints turn into compliments!)
How does your company use email personalization? Let me know in the Comments below.