Jimmy Kim traces email personalization from inserting first names to purchase data to today's segmentation and cart-abandonment triggers. None of it feels truly personal. The promise still outpaces what tools can actually deliver.
What's interesting about personalization is that, like, you know, as I've been in this industry for so long, the idea was like, I really want to make Liam and Jacob have personalized emails that feel like they're for them. So we started off by doing the first name thing, right? And everyone kind of said and agreed that was personalization. And later on we figured out real fast it wasn't. And then you start using the product data and the purchase data you have, and that still doesn't do it. And where we've gotten as far as, in my opinion, is really like segmentation right now, right? Like, at least you can start segmenting a group of people that kind of look alike in some way or fashion, and you can have a better communication to them. But it has been incredibly hard to find a way to truly do that. Technically, if you think about a flow or you think about a triggered event, you are technically personalizing that email down to they just abandoned a cart. Here's the email that's to them. But even to that point, I'm sure you guys will settle already. Like it's still not driving that personalized feeling that people want. The idea behind personalization has always been how do I get that email over to Jacob that is totally different than the one that Liam is getting, for example, because this is where they are in that customer journey. And that's something people have talked about a lot. And I think that it has been a buzzword and something that people are trying to figure out. And you're right, with the modern tools that are out there these days, that's really what it comes down to.
