If you’ve read this blog before you know just how big of a believer I am in personalization and tailoring content to match the user especially when it comes to email marketing. However as it’s become easier and easier to send get messages out there I’ve started to notice downside to personalization, a lack of thought or logic if you will that’s leaving a bad taste in the mouth of consumers and something every company needs to be aware off  — I’m talking about personalization gone wrong.

The benefit from personalization and segmentation in general comes from matching a customer or user with something that’s relevant to them which causes them to find the right match and buy more. While it may seam harmless to match things incorrectly from time to time, it’s anything but. Case in point, in a 2007 survey by ChoiceStream, nearly 40 percent of respondents indicated that they were “less willing to return to sites with poor recommendations.” (ChoiceStream PDF)

But even strong numbers haven’t kept some companies from making bad decisions about how to personalize their marketing messages. A few days ago I recieved what amounts to perfect a example of a personalization mistake…

The problem…

As you can see the above email is from Harry & David and is about Valentine’s Day (subject line reads: Ladies: Here’s the Way to Your Man’s Heart! FREE delivery on select gifts for Valentine’s Day!). Now I’m a huge fan of the brand myself and would buy into their product gladly. Problem is “Ted” isn’t short for anything female yet the email is written entirely for women… Whoops! Now Harry & David may not have used any advanced segmentation tactics to drive this email versus but the concept is still at heart about personalizing, even if the personalization was done to their entire list. 

On the surface this makes a lot of sense and someone in their marketing team made a great suggestion that they focus an under marketed to Valentine’s Day segment [women] knowing their product is a hit with many men. But since Harry & David doesn’t know my gender there’s a serious gap. Very serious.

One could say that Harry & David may have a heavily female list, they may have even surveyed their list to confirm this.  But even if 90% of the recipients were a fit for this message the remaining 10% surely weren’t pleased and definitely weren’t likely to act on the message. Assuming most merely deleted it you’d have a definite marketing loss and in all reality there was likely a nice jump in optout rates as well; afterall, what guy wants to get an email for women. And of course only having 10% of the list be male is very, very unlikely.

The solution…

Gender targeting is a great idea especially for Valentine’s and other peak holiday seasons but it has to be done properly. While some companies try to use first name to sort out gender that’s dicey (think of the names Alex, Chris, Toni/Tony, etc…).  In all reality the only way to get close to accurate is to ask the customer. While most signups don’t have any place to gather this data, Harry & David’s does as they already require all sorts of data including name and address. Adding gender to that sign up page would be a smart idea if they want to continue segmented emails.

For those who don’t have a long form email sign up (which is not something most sites do) there are still opportunities to capture gender or other details through micro-profiling. If you aren’t familiar with it, micro-profiling is the concept of gathering data one or two pieces at a time over a customer’s lifetime. So on day one the customer signs up for email either directly or through an order and on day five you capture their gender through a poll, a short questionnaire, a profile update, a second order or any other means and add it back into the master profile. Even if you don’t want to build a robust profile, asking for some basics once can be enough to establish core segment groups.

But sometimes getting the data you want just doesn’t fit either because of technology challenges or out of fear that the customer won’t be pleased with you asking. In this case you simply have to make the wise decision to skip visibly segmenting along that line. For example, if Harry & David had realized that they didn’t have my gender (perhaps they have it for other users) and sent me a split email geared at men or women individually or a single email that just didn’t talk about gender it would have fit. Lift for the female segment may have been lower but toss outs and confusion from the male segment would go away as would the impact of optouts, brand reputation, etc… 

Not personalizing when you can’t do it right is the right call.

When things do go wrong be ready to act…

No matter how you capture data there will always be some number of people who get the wrong information. This could be a result of a database error, a user error (we don’t always check the right boxes afterall) or something else. When it does happen what matters is that you can identify and address it. If a customer calls or emails your support department to complain they just got an email about Women’s clothing and they’re a guy be sure customer support can fix their profile on the spot.  Too many companies stick their database in a vault so deep that the customer’s only response to getting the wrong message is to opt out completely and that’s a much bigger loss for you than for them,

Personalization is a great tool for any internet marketer and the results are amazing, when done right. The mistake we’re all guilty of is wanting to do more than really makes sense and the email I got is a great example of that. Nice creative, good messaging, wrong data and when the message is this visible the mistakes aren’t missed. 

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