Should I personalize my emails?

You are about to send an email campaign. Assuming one of your leads is Dr Smith from Stanford University. Which of the following subject lines is better?

[Your Product] for Stanford University
[Your Product] for Smith Lab
[Your Product]

Customize your email message based on recipients’ information is called email personalization. Many email marketing programs, including BizGenius, allow you to do this. But is it worth it to do so? To address this question, we did a real experiment. We randomly divided our 2,400 leads into 3 groups, each about 800 leads. Then we sent out an email to the 3 groups at the same time in a Monday morning. The emails for the 3 groups are identical except for the subject line. The first subject line is just the product name, the 2nd is the product name plus the recipient’s last name, the last one is the product name plus the recipient’s organization. We want to compare the open and click rate.

24 hours later, we got the results.

We can see that personalization increased the open rate slightly (about 1%). The name personalization dramatically increased the click rate (100% increase). The organization personalization, however, does not improve the click rate.

Lesson Learned:

1. We should personalize our email with the recipients’ names if possible.