Prior to emails, direct mail experts considered creating mailings with personal names as a great idea. To your surprise, the same thing still happens these days but in a very sophisticated manner as it is tough to computerize handwriting. Therefore, email marketers caught up with this trend and also started using personalized emails in their campaigns by simply putting a form on your site that letting the visitors enter fields like name, last name, email or anything else. And when you need to send out an email message, just include one ‘field variable’ like first name and each subscriber gets personalized email, addressing his/her first name.

In short, personalized emails are important for email marketing, because it enhances the conversion rates. In other words, by personalizing an email message you establish and strengthen your relationship with prospective and existing customers. A personalized email indicates the reader that the sender is someone who knows him, so the recipient of that particular email feels more comfortable while opening and reading your message.

A personalized email helps you develop a line of demarcation for yourself from spammers. Whenever recipients find that they are being addressed by their name whether in a subject line or in the email message, they make out that it is from someone who is familiar to them, so it cannot be looked at as spam mail.

However, there are also few of them who do not agree with this concept. Some marketers conceive that personalizing email marketing mails automatically indicates that the message is for promotional use. Many marketers argue that none of their friends or relatives will send them an email message addressed on their name. They are of the opinion that people who are well-known to them and are acquainted with their names, they do not require using it in email messages.

That might happen in few cases. Still individuals who have provided their names and email addresses to you will have a faith in you and confirm the interest by reading it. In that case there is no reason for them to ignore your email marketing messages. But, if email marketers go on sending promotional emails one after another, then even with or without personalization, your subscribers might get bored and quit following you.

As there are contrasting notions on personalized emails. To some of the marketers personalized emails are perceived as a ‘warning signal to subscribers’ and apprehended of being deleted against doubtful threats of using their names. For many others personalization of email marketing messages is the need of the hour. But do not believe in any of these affirmations.

What you should do is simply check by doing it on your own. If your target audience responds more seriously in the absence of personalization, then it makes no sense using it – and if they prefer personalized emails, then do use it.

However without testing, it would not be easier for email marketers too to find out what works for whom. In other words, whether one should personalize email marketing messages or not is a question that nobody can answer for anyone – it’s, well…personal. And has to be find out by testing on your own.