How to Prioritize Email Personalization’s Perennially Moving Target

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:

1. Wow, personalization is perennially a good investment that pays off.
2. 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.

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