Almost Got It Right

This email popped into my inbox recently. I'm a big fan of personalized emails, where companies place your first name at the top of a marketing email they send you.

It's a nice personal touch, except when it isn't. The challenge with personalization is that it's wonderful when it works, but a disaster if it doesn't. It fits into the category "do it right, or don't do it at all".

The problem with this "personal" email I received?

My name's not Emma.

By getting my name wrong, they've lost me. Email software has made it incredibly easy to put someone's name into an email you send them, and frankly that makes this error even more glaring. Because some people will wonder, "If they can't get my name right, what else are they going to screw up?"

It's very similar when companies claim to have "the best service", or "the friendliest staff", or a "30 minute service guarantee". These are all wonderful things, until you don't deliver on them. And when that happens, the customer focuses on the error even more than they might have otherwise. You're actually better off never making the promise in the first place. Just provide "the best service", or "the friendliest staff", or a "30 minute service guarantee" without telling people about it first.

But back to the mysterious, unknown "Emma of the Email". Now I sit here, wondering, who is Emma? Where is Emma? Is she somewhere in Manchester, or in Los Angeles, or right here in Toronto where our marketing firm 25bikes Media is located? Somewhere, there's a perfectly happy woman named Emma who has received this exact same email and thought, "Isn't it lovely that they addressed this message specifically to me".

And elsewhere all over the world, there are a whole bunch of Joes, Garys, Sallys and Belindas wondering, "Who on earth is Emma?"