Personalization gone wrong

Today I have received another email from Robin Sharma (remember ‘The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari’). No, he doesn’t know me but I get his mailers on a regular basis because I have subscribed to his newsletter. The content is worth reading and I take out time from my schedule to go through it word by word.

This time my marketing antennae caught something weird in his mailer which was directed at my inbox with an aim of trying to soothe or connect with me. We marketers believe that the best form of personalizing an email is to greet a person with his name and our job is done. So even this mail opened like ‘Hi Mandar, …’ but lost sense of personalization in subsequent paragraph. It reads ‘Those of you who have secured your seats from across the planet…’ This clearly tells me that he or his marketing team doesn’t know whether I have subscribed to his upcoming event. So he/they chose to address everybody by leaving the personalization to greeting part of the email only.

They could have easily done two lists, one who have subscribed for the event and other for people who aren’t subscribed, and written two separate copies. But choosing to save little time exposed their gimmick of personalization. Nothing bad with this. This is better than lot many others who don’t even know who have subscribed for their content. But this was not expected something from Robin. Anyways, it’s a great learning for other fellow marketers!

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