“Sim­ple name-slug per­son­al­iza­tion can lift the click-through rate by up to 30%. We’ve seen true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion lift response rates by 300%.”

– Rachael Heapps (Rap­pDig­i­tal) in an inter­view with Direct

Obvi­ously this is talk­ing about email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns (though it’s prob­a­bly not a bad idea stick­ing the name of the per­son you’re writ­ing to on per­sonal emails, either!) and is prob­a­bly quite unsur­pris­ing. With a lit­tle bit of intel­li­gent mail­ing (time-of-day sched­ul­ing, etc.) it’s quite triv­ial to make mass emails appear to orig­i­nate from a real per­son. In my last job we sent out over 110,000 “name-slug” cus­tomised emails each week in a lit­tle over 8 hours (~15,000 an hour) and then a lit­tle faster after some opti­mi­sa­tions (I think it was cut down to six), so if you start it not too late in the morn­ing it’s quite pos­si­ble to get out mes­sages over the course of the day that appear as though they have a gen­uine, per­sonal, author. (The pur­pose, of course, being the pro­mo­tion of Australia’s num­ber one cult-of-celebrity morn­ing show!)

Of course that was newslet­ter con­tent, not the “true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion” [sic] that Heapps speaks of, but for the most part it’s dif­fi­cult to see the appeal of “true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion” more broadly — busi­nesses will gen­er­ally have a core focus and if their cus­tomers are receiv­ing emails from them it’s prob­a­bly in rela­tion to that core area. Excep­tions are obvi­ously out there… two that spring to mind are wholesalers/distributors and mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary cre­ative agen­cies (web/print, event/web, print/vision, etc.) that have fairly dis­tinct groups of clientele.

For churches, “true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion” could take a vari­ety of forms but prob­a­bly won’t in the kind of auto­mated capac­ity Heapps sug­gests. For exam­ple, you could poten­tially have dif­fer­ent email mes­sages for youth/adults, par­ents (kids ministry)/unmarried/childless adults, men/women. How­ever, I do think these would be dif­fer­ent email mes­sages and not merely “per­son­al­i­sa­tions” of the same core email. Then again, if your church sent out a weekly newslet­ter this might be some­what different.

The way St Matthias does things is sim­ply to send out emails as required to rel­e­vant peo­ple. This isn’t man­aged ter­ri­bly well at present and I’m hop­ing we’ll be able to change that over to a proper email cam­paign sys­tem some­time in the near future (when, you know, spare time rears its ugly head!) — BUT, tech­ni­cal aspects aside — it does mean that there is a cer­tain free­ness in the way things are run.

We can send out emails any time, not just when it’s time for a newslet­ter to drop around — and we don’t need to send out emails at all unless there is some rea­son to. That last point is pretty impor­tant, because it means that peo­ple aren’t stress­ing about cre­at­ing a newslet­ter each week/fortnight/month unnec­es­sar­ily. It also means that email from Matthias, in the eyes of our mem­bers and part­ners receiv­ing mes­sages, remains a vehi­cle emi­nently for the pur­poses of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In a way, this is our ver­sion of “true con­tent per­son­al­iza­tion”: irrel­e­vance is not expected, and, pre­sum­ably, we get a bet­ter response for it (though email and web cam­paigns are still quite sep­a­rate… by which I mean to say web cam­paigns are non-existent, and we can’t track email responses accordingly!)

There is, of course, a fac­tor of size. A youth­group with even 40 kids and six or seven lead­ers is prob­a­bly going to strug­gle to write enough con­tent for a newslet­ter each week — or, even if they’re not strug­gling, there are per­haps bet­ter ways they could have spent that time. A larger group might find it immensely help­ful to keep in touch this way.

“Newslet­ter” is a fairly abstract term, how­ever, and don’t hear me say­ing there’s no role for emails that don’t com­mu­ni­cate any­thing new. They’re great for send­ing reminders (auto­matic or man­u­ally crafted) about events even where peo­ple have known about the events for ages. They’re also great for con­sol­i­dat­ing things that have already been said or done (though I per­son­ally see much less of this hap­pen­ing — reflec­tion is more the realm of blogs these days than email, per­haps). Most of all, they’re great when they’re per­sonal and rela­tional. A cold form-mail doesn’t have the same impact as a warm or slightly jovial form-mail, and even the slightly jovial form-mail pales in com­par­i­son with a tru­ely per­sonal mes­sage (in com­po­si­tion and content).

Which raises the ques­tion as to whether this whole thing seems strangely verisimil­i­tudi­nous for a rea­son. We strive to emu­late this per­sonal essence in mechan­i­cal utter­ances (oh, gosh, it’s AH all over again) and find that we can lift our response rates with “true” (there’s the verisimil­i­tude, I guess) con­tent personalisation.

But this is just shout­ing in the mar­ket­place. If we will blame email and elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tions for the decay of inter­ac­tion in soci­ety, we must remem­ber that it is cer­tainly not the first one-to-many medium. The only dif­fer­ence I can see is that, in this mar­ket­place, there are some­times walls of one-way glass that pre­vent reply. That metaphor is inter­est­ing, because it sug­gests that the speaker (the observed one, speak­ing to the mar­ket­place) is the one most dis­ad­van­taged by this cir­cum­stance. We have no right to reply, but they can­not even see us. They know noth­ing about their audi­ence; their audi­ence can­not steer them in the right direction.

This isn’t some Clue­train bea­tup, but an obser­va­tion of what is, upon a lit­tle reflec­tion, self-evident. Essen­tially, if you have a mes­sage to get across to peo­ple, don’t make their job in receiv­ing it any more dif­fi­cult than it needs to be. If you have ambi­gu­i­ties in your mes­sage, let them ask. The ten­dency of organ­i­sa­tions to use no-reply@example.org email addresses is com­pletely con­trary to rea­son with regards to this issue of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The one excep­tion is mass media, which is, it must be said, def­i­nitely not most of us.