A personalization email is an email that you tailor to each recipient. Personalization email are more likely to earn a response than generic spammy-sounding messages, so they're good for salespeople or marketers trying to get people on their lists.

On the flip side, people don't like it when companies know too much personal information about them -- there's always a chance it could be hacked or revealed -- so it's important to be selective about the information you use.

Results from a recent study suggest that most people can tell if they're receiving a personalized email or not , but that might not hold true for a generation just getting used to the Internet. 

Personalization  emails have been around since at least 1997 . Nowadays, "lifetime value" is considered one of the most important metrics in online marketing , which means it's probably also good for your bottom line -- as long as you're not invading anyone's privacy in the process.

How Does Personalization email Work?

Most websites ask for your name, location and e-mail address, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Sites like Facebook give marketers even more data about you (and your social circle) which they can then sell or trade with other companies without notifying you, but there are ways to opt out .

For example, if you're using Gmail, go to the settings page , click on "Accounts" and select "Send mail as:" under your name. 

This will let you change your identity in their system so marketers know you by a different user name than what appears next to your email address. You can create several different user names to correspond to all the different types of emails you get.

If you want to go deeper, there are companies that analyze your Gmail account for you and make a list of every company who's ever emailed you. 

These services can be helpful, but they can also remove some of the mystery from potential spam messages -- it would look more like an opt out service than an actual personalization email.

This is just one example of what happens behind the scenes when you get an email -- marketers have access to many other tools that help them advertise their products in ways that are hard for consumers to recognize.

How To Write Personalized Emails?

Writing that personalized email might seem daunting, but it doesn't have to be that hard -- especially if you can tell from a quick glance whether or not you know the person. 

If you think of yourself as an artist, then writing these emails is like painting by numbers; some colors are required (name and location) while others (whether they've bought anything yet) are optional. 

The key is to see your email list as a group of individuals rather than one big blob of names, which isn't always easy when there are thousands of people on it. To make things easier for yourself, try focusing on each person individually (they don't even need to read this).

First, you want to know what they're interested in, so spend a few minutes browsing their social media profiles , blog or website. If you have any of their contact information, you can also see if there are any telltale signs of what they might be passionate about . 

Additionally, think about the last conversation you had with them. Did your conversation consist of talking about sports? Maybe that person likes NASCAR! Do they keep mentioning something called "Bitcoin"? They probably want to hear more about cryptocurrencies! 

Now that you've got all this information in front of you, it's time to craft an email that brings everything full circle -- it should sound like an invitation rather than a command.

There are lots of tricks for getting people on your list without spamming them. If you ever find yourself wondering if anyone is reading your messages, try sending it to someone who's not on the list instead of just another random email address. 

That way you can see how the recipient responds to your invitation without worrying about how that data will look when they send out your newsletter tomorrow.

Once you've written an email, use a tool like MailChimp or Constant Contact to ensure it's compliant with CAN-SPAM , which sets the rules for commercial messages sent through email.

Alternatively, send messages using addresses provided by volunteer groups who are supposed to report any inappropriate contact attempts -- this way they won't care whether or not you're "spamming" them because they've already given consent!

Email Personalization tactics

According to the 2015 State of Personalization Report, email personalization is the number one sales tool in today's market - 57% of marketers surveyed said this was their top priority. 

The study goes on to report that 90% of companies are using some form of personalization, but less than half are doing it well. This means that there is a lot more room for improvement!

Bad data leads to spam filters and inboxes full of irrelevant emails which means low open rates and high unsubscribe rates. With so much riding on effective email marketing efforts, how can you ensure your data will help deliver successful results?

Let's take a look at some of the most common tactics used to personalize email as well as how each tactic can affect deliverability.

1. Relevant Content: The reason for this post! Show your prospects and customers something they will be interested in, and you're much more likely to capture their interest. 

If you don't know what your prospect is looking for, show them what you offer and hope it is relevant (but don't expect great results).

If we were sending out an email like the one above, we would include "Digitizing Healthcare - Healthcare technology has changed rapidly over the past few years with many providers investing significant time and money into electronic medical records." in our preheader text. 

If we were sending out the email to a list of healthcare professionals, we could simply use "Nursing Technology - Nursing technology has changed rapidly over the past few years with many providers investing significant time and money into electronic medical records." as our preheader text. 

This is where tools like Google's Auto Suggest or Customer.io come in handy, if you don't already have data on what your prospects are interested in (or who they are). 

These tools can save you a lot of time searching for relevant content that will appeal to certain segments of your audience.

2. Relevant Images: If your images aren't relevant to the subject of the email, why have them? It's a waste of space and it can hurt engagement.

This is just a simple lookup to see which category an image belongs in, googling image:example.com . Replace the example.com with your website URL and make sure you add "&imgtype=0" to get all images from one domain.

What you find in this example is that 79% of our website's images are relevant to a healthcare provider (given we use this for a hospital). 

So that means 81% could be relevant if we used different images on our landing pages! The other approach is much easier - using an ESP or automation tool like Customer.io where you can upload a list of images that you'd like to include in your email and they'll randomly choose from them. 

In your Javascript, simply use image_url = 'https://www.example.com/image-name'; .

3. Relevant Content + Relevant Images: This approach is simple - show your customers what they are looking for with relevant images!

If we wanted to take this example one step further, we could do something similar to the personalization tactics used by Zappos and Amazon as shown here by HubSpot.

4. Timely Content: What have people been searching Google for? Well, if you want sales leads, track those search terms so you know what people are interested in. 

Your customers probably use similar terms on their own websites, so track those search terms tools! Once you find out what is hot (or not), plan your email content around it.

5. Personalized From Address: You might be familiar with the above email examples. There are two real emails I received in the last week, one is from my Amazon Store links quit working on their site and the other comes from New Relic, which sent an update to everyone that was using their product. 

I use this tactic all the time, if your ESP allows you to do this! If it does not, you can always send yourself test emails just to get this data on hand since most sites allow you to put any name in the "From" field of an email. 

Then when sending out a marketing campaign or new sweepstakes or promotion or whatever else you want to segment by people who actually opened your previous email (if you're using an ESP that allows this), filter by people who opened the last campaign or promotion, then filter that list by open time, domain or ip address - anything you know about their history with your company. 

This will ensure the majority of your emails are being sent to people who at least care enough about what you have to say to see if their inbox is full.

6. Personalize Your Site's Content :  Another way I like to personalize my email content is by adopting plugins like MemberPress (which limits how many times a user can login). 

If they are a member, they get different content than if they are not. Using this with the emails I send out would be an epic win for my business!

7. Sharing Is Caring: Personalize your blog posts by adding photos of your author's face or showing off some logos you've worked on together. That way the whole world will understand who wrote that post and why it is important to them.

8. Personalized Offers: Have you ever noticed how many people drop their business cards on the ground at a trade show or conference? Me neither. 

That's because they've been personalized for each event - and it helps them stand out from all the other companies! A lot of people do this by hand, but there are also tools available to help with this such as Designer News , which I'm sure everyone has seen before.

9. Don't Be Scammy:  I've started to see bad practice in email personalization lately - where companies send out emails that say "Brought to you by LinkedIn" and then ask me to connect my social media accounts. 

This is just a bad strategy - if we want our email content to be personal and relevant, we should not try to spam it with false endorsements.