Personalization of mailings using the column “name” in fillable forms: pros and cons

The effectiveness of your site to the benefit of the business is largely provided by the little things. For example, did you think about whether to include the “name” column in the forms to be filled out? Some believe that this is necessary, since it significantly increases the level of feedback, others disagree. Although there is no agreement on this issue, it is worth discussing. What we do together with Pam Neely.

Completed forms - the first step of your potential client to meet you. Even if an unsuccessfully drawn up form will deprive you of only 10% of the profits, this will be very significant, and especially noticeably affect future sales.

Why it is not necessary to make the column "name" in the form?
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Let's start with the fact that everyone knows: the more points in your welcome form, the lower the percentage of registered users. Web conversion gurus call this feature “friction”. That it will be the first argument against.

The second reason is that not everyone will fill this field, even if you leave it. As a rule, visitors simply write something like “I will not specify a name” or “my name is in no way”. As a result, instead of the expected effect of personalizing the letter, your clients will receive something like “Dear, I will not indicate your name, we invite you to take part in the action”. Such letters will not just sound funny, but once again remind users that in fact you are only pretending to sincerely appreciate communicating with them, but in reality you are flattering for the sake of achieving your goal.

In addition, this kind of personalization increases the likelihood of spam, and, as a result, an increasing number of customers will refuse your services. Get Response recently conducted a study on this topic, processing the results of 53,000 emails, and found that letters with personalized fields scored 25% more points and have 130% higher CTR than letters without such fields, and this, of course, is wonderful . But, besides this, it was revealed, unfortunately, that there were even more complaints about spam with the subsequent refusal of service. There were 26% more complaints to letters with personalized fields. And the bounce rate is 71% more bounce than emails without personalization.

Finally, you should exclude this field from the form because you can always ask the name of the client after he becomes your regular visitor, i.e. take advantage of the “progressive profiling” marketing trick. True, in order for this to work, you will need to learn some technical tricks, but with the help of the GetResponse service you can easily cope with this, provided, of course, that you manage to motivate your client during the communication with him so much that agree to fill out another form. Of course, progressive profiling does not claim special popularity among marketers, but, nevertheless, this is an additional opportunity to continue communication with reference to the postal address, and this is exactly what you need.

Why, despite all the above, is it sometimes worth asking the name of the client?

No need to hurry. After all, statistics, nevertheless, shows that personalization as a whole significantly improves results. Despite the fact that some studies show the opposite, in most cases the sales curve is really growing. An example of this could be a study conducted in the 2013 Experian Email Marketing Study. It showed that personalized messages receive 6 times more chances for feedback. So what is more important for you: reduction in the number of registered users by 10% or, nevertheless, an increase in feedback by 6 times?

It is necessary to take into account the fact that personalization as a whole is more than just mentioning the name of the client. It can allow you to change the content of letters depending on the purchase history, postal codes, search queries history. There are many examples of when this kind of personalization, including the mention of a personal name in the headers of letters, significantly increased the conversion.



After all, for some reason, most e-commerce sites use this or that type of personalization and 60% of them prefer to indicate the column “personal name” in salutatory forms.

What should really worry us in this matter is that which outweighs: disadvantages or merits. To answer this difficult question, let's break it apart.

Does the inclusion of a “personal name” in the questionnaire reduce the chances of registering?

We know that there is such a fact, but how much exactly do the chances decrease? Unfortunately, the research results are so different that it is impossible to provide any statistics on this issue. Testing is the only way to understand this! We understand that this is not what you would like to hear, but, nevertheless, there is no other way to get an answer to this question, and this is confirmed by experience. Probably, statistics figures differ significantly depending on the type of business. Try to conduct an experiment in your area and maybe all the mentioned disadvantages will be insignificant, and the advantages will exceed all expectations.

How much does personalization increase the chances of increasing conversion?

As we have already seen, personalization can both significantly increase the level of feedback and reduce it. In any case, no matter how you do it, you will still get better results (at least 10%).

Now the next question arises: how much will spam increase? Of course, your situation may resemble the situation with GetResponse, however, even in their research there were many useful things for us. So, for example, if you look at their experience from the other side: if marketers started to use the client’s name in the mailing headers too quickly (after only 1-2 greeting messages), then they received a higher percentage of email refusals almost immediately after the subscription. So, maybe the problem was that the client's name was used in the mailing list too early for him to believe that you are really sincerely trying to make contact with him?

Here there is a last moment that may interest us: you should not use personalization for each of the mailing list. You can include proper names, say, on every second or every third newsletter, and then it will be much easier for the client to believe that you are not just partners, but friends, which will significantly increase your chances of increasing the conversion.

The final answer to this question, we, nevertheless, can be obtained only by experimenting (and sharing the results of our own experience).

Please tell us about your experience in this area? Maybe you already have some results and statistics on your type of business that could help many? Please leave your comments!