A personal email gets read; a mass email with a first name pasted in does not fool anyone. In this exercise you learn what real personalisation is, how to spot the fake kind and where the line is between relevant and creepy. Read the short guide and the scenario first, then press Start exercise for four tasks.
Four levels of personalisation
Level | What changes from email to email | Example opener |
|---|---|---|
None | Nothing | Dear Sir or Madam, we offer bookkeeping for businesses of every kind. |
Name only | A merge field: a placeholder such as {FirstName} that software fills in from a list | Hi Maria, we offer bookkeeping for businesses of every kind. |
Segment | The text fits a group: an industry, a role, a company size | Hi Maria, wineries that sell directly to customers often have many more receipts to manage. |
Individual | One true, relevant fact about this company, linked to the offer | Hi Maria, I saw that Coho Winery opened a farm shop in May, which usually means a lot more small receipts. |
Segment-level emails are not bad: they can be honest and useful. Individual emails take more research, so they are worth it when the list is short and each customer is valuable.
Real or fake?
Fake personalisation sounds personal but says nothing specific: "I loved your website", "I came across your profile and was really impressed", "I have been following your company for a while". Readers see through it at once.
The test is simple: could this sentence be sent, unchanged, to 100 other companies? If yes, it is not personal. A real detail is specific, true and checkable: a date, a place, a product, a job advert, a quote from the company's own news page.
Relevant, creepy or irrelevant?
A good detail passes three questions:
Is it about the business, not the person's private life?
Is it public, published by the company or the person for business purposes?
Is it linked to your offer? A true detail that has nothing to do with what you sell is just noise.
A detail that fails the first two questions is creepy: it shows you dug into someone's private life. A detail that only fails the third is irrelevant.
The data protection angle
An overview, not legal advice. In the European Union and the United Kingdom, a person's name and work email address (such as maria.lopez@cohowinery.example) are personal data, so the GDPR (in the UK, the UK GDPR) applies, also in B2B sales. A generic address such as info@ is usually not personal data. Some principles that limit personalisation:
Data minimisation (Article 5(1)(c)): collect only what is adequate, relevant and limited to what you need for your purpose. Notes on someone's family or hobbies have no place in a sales list.
Purpose limitation (Article 5(1)(b)): data collected for one purpose must not be used for an incompatible one.
Transparency (Article 14): if you did not get the data from the person themselves, you have to tell them, among other things, where it came from. If you use it to contact them, this has to happen at the latest at the first contact.
Right to object (Article 21): a person can object to direct marketing at any time, and you then have to stop.
Whether you may send the email at all is a separate question, answered by other laws, such as § 7 UWG in Germany or PECR in the UK. See cold email and the law. The GDPR principles exercise practises the principles themselves.
The scenario
Proseware, a fictional bookkeeping service, wants to write to Maria Lopez, office manager at Coho Winery, a fictional family winery. The winery's website names Maria as the contact for suppliers. Its news page says it opened a farm shop and an online shop in May, and it recently posted a job advert for a part-time bookkeeper. All tasks below are about this email.
Teacher notes
How to run it (35 minutes). 10 minutes: read the guide together. Ask the class for the most obviously fake compliment they have ever received in an email or message. 15 minutes: the four tasks in the exercise. 10 minutes: discussion of the grey areas below.
Grey areas worth discussing.
A post the person wrote on a professional network about their own work: public and business-related, so usually fine. A post about their weekend: not.
A podcast or conference talk by the person: fine to refer to, if it is linked to your offer.
Information that is public but was clearly not published for this purpose, such as a court record or a home address in a club newsletter: creepy, and hard to justify under data minimisation.
Common mistakes.
Thinking a first name makes an email personal. It is the lowest level.
Thinking "public" means "fine to use for anything". Public personal data is still personal data.
Using a true detail that has nothing to do with the offer ("Congratulations on 30 years in business! We sell coffee machines."). It is not creepy, but it is decoration.
Forgetting the source. "I saw on your website..." answers the reader's question "how do you know this?" before they ask it, and it helps with Article 14.
Follow-up questions.
Why do senders use fake personalisation if readers see through it?
How much research is reasonable for one email? Where would you stop?
Rewrite one fake opener from the sorting task into a real one, using a fact you invent for a fictional company.
Going further. Plan the research step itself in the account research lesson, or practise spotting good reasons to write in the buying signals exercise.